Owen Klinsky
Contributor
The Biden-Harris administration released data on Oct. 17 suggesting its push to electrify everything will ratchet up costs for American households, contradicting one of the White House’s favorite selling points for its green agenda, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Biden-Harris administration has made a crackdown on residential fossil fuel consumption a key aspect of its environmental strategy, justifying the push in part on the grounds electrification will lower energy costs. Now, Oct. 17 residential energy price data from the Department of Energy (DOE) shows electricity was roughly four times as expensive as natural gas in 2024, with experts telling the DCNF the White House’s electrification push is an example of extremist climate policy hurting everyday Americans. (RELATED: Forget Stoves! The Biden Admin Is Working Overtime To Phase Out All Your Gas Appliances)
“The Department of Energy has consistently shown that natural gas is a much cheaper energy source for households than electricity,” Daren Bakst, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, told the DCNF. “Government policies trying to block the use of natural gas in favor of electricity will significantly drive up prices, making home heating and appliance use needlessly expensive. The poor will get hurt the most because, compared to higher income households, they spend a greater share of their household income on meeting basic needs such as staying warm in the winter.”
AOC Attacks Republicans Over Gas Stoves
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “I do think it’s funny, the…absolute…Republican meltdown…’You can’t take my gas stove…How dare you…You have a gas stove.’
“First of all, I rent.” pic.twitter.com/F32HhSzEga— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 13, 2023
The Biden-Harris DOE has issued a slew of rules restricting the use of gas appliances, including issuing revised standards on furnaces in September 2023 that could prohibit 40-60% of gas furnaces in homes, and increased efficiency requirements for water heaters that the agency claimed would save U.S. consumers $11.4 billion on their energy and water bills every year.
The Oct. 17 data showed electricity was significantly more expensive than fossil fuels, with a price of $47.36 per million British Thermal Units (BTU) compared to $13.38 and $33.59 per million BTU for natural gas and propane respectively. Thus, according to the Biden-Harris administration’s own data, switching from gas-powered appliances to electric appliances could increase utility costs by over 3.5 times, in addition to heightened installation costs.
“One of the most offensive bait-and-switch moves being played by officials in Washington D.C. and coastal enclaves is the push to force electric appliances on everyone, everywhere, even when natural gas can often be dramatically cheaper,” O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers and the former solicitor general of Arizona, told the DCNF. “The officials push the idea that bans on gas stoves, or gas furnaces, or other gas appliances will save on energy costs, but at the same time they have evidence that natural gas is cheaper…It’s time that officials in D.C. stopped trying to micromanage people’s lives and make everyone hew to a one size fits all approach to their homes.”
Energy sector expert Robert Bryce accused the Biden-Harris administration of purposely delaying the release of the price data on Oct. 3, citing the fact that, at least since 2011, the DOE has never published the information later than August. At the time — two weeks before the data was published — he predicted the agency was stonewalling because the cost figures would reflect the high costs of electricity relative to fossil fuels, which has proven to be accurate.
“This electrification push is a typical example of climate extremism,” Bakst told the DCNF. “There’s little to no consideration of how these policies will hurt Americans and the poor.”
An “electrification summit” held by the White House in December 2022 included non-governmental organization Rewiring America, which has previously stated its goal is to “electrify everything.”
The DOE did not respond to a request for comment.
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But CO2 is pollution, and evil! So we must go electric!!
Don’t ask where the electricity is going to come from, or what it costs.
The fundamental building block of plants and animals has such a negative connotation.
going to come from, or what it costs.
Electrifying everything makes no sense, even if you are climate concerned. Shows how cognitively impaired Biden and his team are.
Solar has a capacity factor at best of 20% in ideal locations Ike the US SW desert.. Wind at best is thirty in the best locations. So at least 70% of the time, CCGT backup is needed. Unavoidable.
CCGT is 61% thermally efficient. A gas cook stove is 100%. A modern furnace like the propane at my farm is 95% efficient. Better off from a CO2 perspective to burn the natgas for direct heat than burn it in CCGT to produce the electricity renewables can’t.
Not only that, but also the fact that the electricity has to also has to be transmitted and delivered and then (for heating or cooking) converted back into heat. Electric stoves aren’t so bad as they are only used intermittently, but heating with electricity in any place other than the deep south is a joke.
So at least 70% of the time, CCGT backup is needed.
Except CCGT doesn’t fulfil the use-case required for backing up wind and solar. For that SCGT, a far less efficient, but much more responsive must be utilized.
ironically, solar and wind demand that SCGT is preferred over CCGT which drives up costs and is less Green.
I can hardly wait to watch the first electric snow plow push a couple of feet snow off the streets. Fifteen F dark outside needing to use wipers, lights, and heater not counting hydraulic pumps to move blade of plow (plough).
Electrify Everything.
Just as the abilities and the desires of foreign actors to cause civilizational collapse on their enemies with EMP attacks increase.
Did we learn nothing over the past few years with tornados, hurricanes, wild-fires, blizzards, wind-storms and floods knocking out electrical power in local regional and wide-spread areas?
Hydrocarbons to the rescue each and every time.
Have we also not learned the extremely obvious and simple solution that when an enemy wants to control, decapitate or otherwise materially threaten another country, its always through the distribution of hydrocarbons?
Has any policy threatened to cripple an economy by sanctioning wind and solar or does policy get done when undersea pipelines are destroyed, oil platforms and transfer depots targeted and shipping lanes blocked?
Power both practical and political come from the control, stockpiling and ability to deliver hydrocarbons, not to occasionally and intermittently harvest a trickle of electricity from WX dependent sources.
Diversity only applies to government programs.
I can sum up Democrat policies thusly:
Cackle.
Story tip: Starmer’s party of the people
“”The Labour MP who punched a male constituent has been suspended from the party.
Mike Amesbury had yesterday claimed he was ‘threatened’ before the attack at 2.15am…””
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14008209/Labour-MP-Mike-Amesbury-SUSPENDED-sucker-punching-constituent-beating-lay-ground-Shocking-CCTV-shows-moment-attack-unfolded-MP-claimed-man-threatened-him.html
Fun video.If you espouse lefty values…
If we are so invested in electrification, can we at least restore the electric chair for heinous crimes?
Only if they use green energy. /s
With or without the sponge?
Wet or dry?
If it isn’t wet it’s irrelevant.
What’s truly insane about this is that 4X the price of electricity isn’t even close. If you were to actually electrify “everything” the power grid would have to triple or quadruple in size. It took decades to build what we have now.
The laws of supply and demand are not linear. Trying to go all electric in a short period of time would require an overhaul of the grid. Not just generation either. Transmission lines, substations, breaker boxes, all of it.
Price of electricity would necessarily sky rocket. Obama warned us.
With electricity 20X or 30X the cost of gas, a black market would emerge. History is repetitive.
Obama didn’t warn us. He promised us. His statement of “Under my plan, the cost of electricity must skyrocket” was made before he was elected.
He also promised us that under his other plan, you could keep your doctor and save $2500 per year on insurance premiums.
One out of three promises kept.
This is the problem, government thinks it is okay to lie. It isn’t, stop lying. This is exactly why those in government need to be individually held accountable.
Joe Biden will go down in history as one of the best environmentally concerned presidents ever.
He also has done more for diversity, women, minorities and indigenous peoples than any other president.
He has spent more on climate mitigation than any other president.
Joe is a modern day environmental hero.
Things were all wine and roses for Joe and his agendas until he mumbled for an hour on TV.
Then, democrat billionaires turned on him and made him withdraw because he couldn’t win without their money.
But he endorsed Harris as a replacement and suddenly, that decision was OK with billionaires and all democrats.
But somehow, all his decisions as president and commander in chief since the mumbling are still great policy to pursue.
You couldn’t make this stuff up because no one would have ever believed it. But there it is.
As a SciFi movie it would get an Oscar.
Liars and hypocrites … I heard that Elon Musk stopped driving his Tesla.
See
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/10/650m-in-renewable-energy-didnt-save-broken-hill-from-days-of-blackouts-after-a-storm-islanded-it/
for the result of not having rotating machinery and/or fossil-fuelled generators to stabilise a grid.
Lots of potential power but nothing practical
Interesting numbers. To be fair, the $47.36/MMBTU electric charge would be divided by about 2.2 (7.5 HSPF2 / 3.412 BTU/Wh, based on current Federal standards for heat pumps), unless one is using electric baseboards, or some other resistance type heater, to heat their residence.
On the other hand, we in CT can only dream of electricity priced at 16.16 cents/kWh – our last bill was for 19.99 cents/kWh, excluding energy supply. Here’s the breakdown:
Transmission: 3.3
Delivery: 7.9
Public Benefits Charge (don’t ask): 8.6
Needless to say, we’ll continue to use heating oil this winter.
How this can be a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together is a mystery to me. The bottom line is that the only result of electrification of cooktops is to put insulation (and a lot of it) between the fossil fuel flame and your pot.
Most US electric power is generated in plants that burn fossil fuels to produce heat, which is then transformed into electric energy via a heat engine driving a generator. 40% to 60% of the heat energy produced by the fossil fuel combustion is lost in conversion to electrical energy. A further 10% to 15% is lost in transmission of that electrical energy to the customer’s stove. And the most efficient electric cooktops (induction types) lose a further 10% in converting back to heat. Which means that for every BTU one gets by burning natural gas in a combined cycle power plant, at best 0.486 BTU appears as heat with which to cook. In other words, electric cooktops use 2 times as much natural gas – at best – as gas models. The typical numbers are much worse.
I read climate-related articles every day and have done so for many years. Something I have seen almost no coverage on is the adverse CO2 effect of pushing to electrify everything.
Imagine that we are on a critical “tipping point” on global climate change (warming) and that CO2 from fossil fuels is the assumed to be main cause.
If we therefore must electrify everything as fast as possible using “renewables”, what are the near term CO2 effects (and supposed climate) effects involved in achieving this massive electrification?
Well I think we would have to initiate a MASSIVE increase in the use of fossil fuel use in order to acquire the enormous amounts of minerals required to mine, transport, refine, smelt, fabricate, manufacture, re-transport, assemble and connect to the massively expanded grid in order to even get a significant start on the electrification fairy tale.
if you don’t already have massive “renewable” electrical resources, you obviously can’t use renewables to acquire the materials necessary to make the big change to renewables, so a massive use of fossil fuels would be required in order to acquire the minerals necessary for the transformation to begin. Since “renewables” are also intermittent, you still need fossil fuel back-up.
So, the conversion to electric “everything” would require a massive increase in CO2 emissions until it was completed and then would still require the continuation of fossil fueled generation as backup to prevent massive human death in cold climates (like mine).
I would like to see a neutral informed scientific analysis addressing the mid-term acceleration of CO2 emissions required to achieve this in the near and longer term while we are on the “tipping point” of CO2 emissions.
“There’s little to no consideration of how these policies will hurt Americans and the poor.”
More equity to the rescue-
Germany Plays with Fire as Diesel Drivers Tax Will Fund EV Subsidies
Same in the UK. The rates OFGEM (Office of Gas and Electricity Markets) introduced in Jan 24 were
Gas 7.42p per kWh plus daily standing charge of 29.6p
Electricity 28.62p per kWh plus daily standing charge of 54.3p
Over 22m of the 28m homes here are on the gas network
Of course the government is trying to control you again. The program to get everyone to switch light bulbs worked mostly. Now they are pushing for control on your car, furnace, and appliances.
The handwriting was on the wall. Get the populace to change light bulbs then move on to bigger things. I sometimes think they just like to push the envelope to see how well their plan to make all of us drones is progressing.