By Steve Goreham
From New York to California, state renewable electrical power dreams are collapsing. Power demands soar, while the federal government cuts funding and support for wind, solar, and grid batteries. Renewables cannot provide enough power to support the artificial intelligence revolution. The Net Zero electricity transition is failing in the United States.
For the last two decades, state governments have embraced policies aimed at replacing coal and natural gas power plants with renewable sources. Twenty-three states enacted laws or executive orders to move to 100% Net Zero electricity by 2050. Onshore and offshore wind, utility-scale and rooftop solar, and grid-scale batteries were heavily promoted by states and most federal administrations.
The New York State Climate Action Scoping Plan of 2022 called for 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2040. But 49.7% of the state’s electricity came from gas in 2024, up from 47.7% in 2023. A January executive order issued by President Trump halted federal leases for construction of offshore wind systems. New York, nine other east coast states, and California were counting on offshore wind in efforts to get to 100% renewable electricity, but new offshore wind projects are now halted.
Wind and solar have benefited from federal tax credits, loans, and outright grants since 1992. But the Trump administration is now working to slash federal government support for these technologies. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) passed the House of Representatives on May 22. The bill eliminates Production Tax Credits and Investment Tax Credits for renewable systems that begin construction later than 60 days after passage of the bill or for projects that do not complete construction by year end 2028. The bill also halts the sale of tax credits from renewable projects. If the Senate passes the bill, these measures will choke off green energy projects that have relied on federal funding for decades.
Wind and solar advocates attack the OBBB, warning that the bill would create a “nightmare scenario” for US clean energy. These same advocates claim that wind and solar are the lowest-cost generators of electricity but also demand that huge federal subsidies must continue.
Along with federal cutbacks, the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution now drives the nation’s power system, interrupting the renewable electricity transition. Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and other giant firms are building new data centers and upgrading existing data centers to power AI. AI processors run 24-hours a day for months to enable computers to think like humans. When servers are upgraded to support AI, they consume 6 to 10 times more power than when used for cloud storage and the internet. Data centers consumed 4% of US electricity at the start of 2024 but are projected to consume 20% within the next decade.
Artificial intelligence drives a massive increase in electricity demand. For years, state legislators forced grid operators to close coal and natural gas power plants as part of a transition to renewables. More than 200 coal-fired power plants were closed. But now, many states face a shortage of generating capacity. Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, with power consumption forecasted to triple by 2040. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas estimates that Texas electricity demand will soar from a record 85.5 gigawatts in 2023 to 218 GW by 2031.
In December, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation concluded that that over half of North America risks power shortfalls in the next decade from surging demand and coal and gas plant retirements. Grid operators are now stepping back from the transition to wind and solar. Coal-fired power plant closures have been postponed in Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and other states. Nuclear plants are being restarted in Michigan and Pennsylvania. But the big winner will be natural gas.
More than 200 gas plants are planned or under construction. Gas facilities can be brought online in about three years, compared to ten years for nuclear plants. Gas plants can be built near cities, often on former power plant sites, and require fewer new transmission lines than needed by wind and solar systems.
The latest trend is BYOP (bring your own power). AI firms are building their own gas plants to power data centers. Gas turbine manufacturer capacity is now sold out for years. The gas share of electricity production will rise from 43.6% of US consumption in 2024 to much higher levels. The AI power demand and the push for gas are destroying state plans for a transition to green electricity.
California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Texas, and other states are installing grid-scale batteries to try to compensate for wind and solar intermittency. Huge lithium batteries are intended to store excess wind and solar output when the wind blows and the sun shines and then release electricity when wind and solar output is low. But lithium batteries are unproven technology that is prone to spontaneous ignition, creating huge fires that are difficult to extinguish and which endanger residents.
In the last two years, California suffered four grid battery fires, each at facilities less than five years old. The Otay Mesa storage facility near San Diego burned for more than a week and reignited three times. The Moss Landing battery facility, located south of Santa Cruz, caught fire in January. Forty percent of Moss Landing, one of the largest grid-scale battery facilities in the world, was destroyed in the fire. Residents have sued to prevent the restart of Moss Landing. New York also had three grid battery fires in the last 18 months. Battery fires release toxic gases, force evacuations and school closures, and disrupt communities.
In addition, grid batteries are very expensive. To back up a wind or solar facility for 24 hours requires batteries that cost about ten times as much as the wind or solar system itself. But without grid batteries, wind and solar cannot replace coal, gas, or nuclear generation and still provide reliable power.
The cost of wind, solar, and batteries is hurting the renewable electricity transition. Electricity rates in California, the epicenter of green energy, have risen 116% in the last 16 years, more than three times the national average increase of 33%. California’s residential electricity prices are now over 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, the second highest in the nation. Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island complete the top five for the highest US power costs—all states with aggressive green electricity goals.
The Net Zero electricity transition, endorsed by many states for more than a decade, is failing in the United States. Wind, solar, and batteries suffer from the offshore wind cancellation, federal subsidy cuts, inability to meet the demand of the artificial intelligence revolution, grid battery fires, and high cost. A green energy breakdown is underway. States will be forced to return to sensible energy policy.
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Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure. His prior posts at MasterResource are here.
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I’m in Northern California and would LOVE to see 30¢/KWh. We face 36¢ off demand and 56¢ Peak Demand prices
That beats South Australia and Germany. Hope you do not need much.
Costs like that would surely make your own solar and battery economically viable. Just leech off the grid during cloudy periods like all the other”renewable” parasites.
Unfortunately my daughter is Heat Intolerant so we must keep the house under 73°F and our A/C is on all summer long so a $750 electric bill is common
Is Heat Intolerant a medically diagnosed condition? What is the physical basis/cause of the condition?
Both my wife and youngest (adult) daughter can’t stand the heat of our Desert Southwest (Las Vegas) location. Our A/C is run such as to keep the house at about 72-74F. I put in a large, above-ground swimming pool for them to cool off and get some outdoor exercise in the summer.
Cause undetermined but at temps above 73°F with mild-moderate exertion she starts to get red in the face. At 72°F she can’t walk farther than 1/4 mile without needing cold water. At temps above 76°F she shows heat stress without exertion.
Just got news that Australia’s sovereign wealth fund has slashed exposure to US equities due to the anticipated volatility caused by POTUS Trump.
Or it could be Trump snubbed PM Sleezy in Canada.
If USA is not chasing NetZero they are not a good bet. That really underscores how screwed Australia is. The government and union super funds are heavily invested in NetZero so they have to push consumers as hard as they can bear to get an investment return.
6-month sp500 chart shows no drama. I guess Australia’s sovereign wealth fund is no cause for drama.
Google says “Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Future Fund, has a total size of A$240.8 billion (approximately US$158.5 billion) as of March 31, 2025.”
$158B sounds like a big number to me, but I think Bill Gates is still over $100B- so Australia is approximately as wealthy as USA’s most famous rich guy.
At 14th on the world GDP list (says IMF) Aus is economically about 5% the size of USA. I think China, Germany, India and Japan could move the market more noticeably, but differences in how their governments work would stop some of them.
Forex markets might be a better place to look than equities, but I’ve never looked closely at them. Intuition tells me it would be the same list of heavyweights driving that market, plus I’d add in some oil nations. I do not even know what denomination is used in Saudi without Googling, but it seems like that should be important for foreign exchange – Australian dollar? Is it important? Maybe for selling coal to China.
What are the most traded forex pairs in the world?
EUR/USD (euro/US dollar)
USD/JPY (US dollar/Japanese yen)
GBP/USD (British pound/US dollar)
AUD/USD (Australian dollar/US dollar) <—– here
USD/CAD (US dollar/Canadian dollar)
USD/CNY (US dollar/Chinese renminbi)
USD/CHF (US dollar/Swiss franc)
USD/HKD (US dollar/Hong Kong dollar)
EUR/GBP (euro/British pound sterling)
USD/KRW (US dollar/South Korean won)1
Rather than measure relative values or sizes, I went to most actively traded currency pairs by dollar volume. There’s Australian dollar to US dollar in 4th most active position for whatever year my source was looking at. No mention anywhere of oil nations. Oh well. The Saudis must keep their dollars as dollars and not nother printing anything to trade with.
Sorry for all the posts on this topic, I just thought its fun to chase a learning expedition, you can follow mine or skip it by scrolling.
The New York State Climate Action Scoping Plan of 2022 called for 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2040. But 49.7% of the state’s electricity came from gas in 2024, up from 47.7% in 2023.
And we all had to drive EVs and charge them with fickles?
Toyota says its hybrids have saved as much CO2 as 9 million electric cars
Nobody had to be coerced or bribed to buy and drive Toyota hybrids as they make a lot of sense for cabbies and urban commuters.
I’ve got nothing against ai, but computers don’t think and never will think, they compute.
It depends on how you define “think”. Some have passed the Turing Test.
The Turing Test doesn’t test a computer’s ability to think. It tests a HUMAN’s ability to tell the difference between a human and a human imposter.
Yes, of course- but it will have the appearance of thinking- which is probably the case with a very large number of homo sapiens. 🙂
Most Democrats lack the appearance of Thinking. Perhaps they want AI for the potential Brain Transplant/Augmentation
On the other hand, Scarecrow only needed to be handed a college diploma by the Wiz to suddenly have a brain.
Ref: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, good scifi about separating thinking from computing using empathy if you can overlook where the author’s born-before-WW1 worldview becomes most notable.
Yep…They ain’t nottin but big adding machines :<)
AI does is not conscious, it is not self-aware.
AI does not have intuition nor can it make intuitive leaps or have an inspiration.
AI does not have any mores.
Therefore AI is not intelligent. Per ChatGPT
AI is structured software, a weighted decision tree that can be adaptive, all hidden behind an excellent human language interface.
It is the language interface that cause many to believe it is intelligent.
“Americans will always do the right thing—after exhausting all other possibilities.”
Winston Churchill.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison about inventing the light bulb.
How can something that is a total fantasy “collapse”?
Fairy dust.
Damnit, Bobby, I ordered unicorn farts!
A house of cards?
The taxpayer largesse propping up the facade of it being viable,, useful or inexpensive being removed.
“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas estimates that Texas electricity demand will soar from a record 85.5 gigawatts in 2023 to 218 GW by 2031.”
Wow, that seems unreal. But Texas is a place they could actually pull it off.
“But without grid batteries, wind and solar cannot replace coal, gas, or nuclear generation and still provide reliable power.”
And *with* grid batteries, you still need the same coal, gas, or nuclear generation capacity. What a mirage, that ANY wind or solar sources are still claimed to be net-beneficial to the overall system! What about behind-the-meter? Fine, on your own dime.
I wish they would build dozens of coastal plants that desalinate their cooling water and make the deserts of West Texas bloom. Multi-billion dollar decadal projects to make pretty flowers might sound dumb, but at least it’s technically feasible. As long as it doesn’t end like Salton Sea.
What is done with all the salt?
“How much does 1 ton of salt cost?
When purchased in bulk, rock salt typically ranges from $60 to $80 per ton. This pricing is most common among municipalities or large-scale buyers. However, for smaller quantities or retail use, prices can climb up to $120–$160 per ton due to extra costs like packaging and transport.”
“‘Net Zero’ Is Collapsing in U.S. States”
Not in Wokeachusetts- not yet anyway. Nowhere in the mainstream media here will you see anything against it. No community – nor the state government is hinting in any way that we won’t reach net zero nirvana by 2050. Of course it will collapse- but few people in this state currently understand this. Very few people here read this site or any other climate emergency skeptical sites. Lots of highly educated people here but try discussing the climate with them and you’ll see they know next to nothing about the topic. Tell them that the net zero objective is going to fail soon and they’ll look shocked.
Buncha Deniers if ya ask me!
Hah. I’m gonna start calling them denier deniers.
This is the problem with coopting words for trendy meanings: The new word dies with the trend yet the old word has still been devalued by overuse. Surge. Gaslight. Unprecedented.
You mean like skeptic has been hijacked and redefined as doubter or denier?
It looks like the Net Zero collapse will be a sudden and devastating surprise to the Massachusetts intelligentsia. Will probably require a lot of mental-health professionals. Go long on pharmaceutical firms making anti-depressants.
Computers do not “think like humans.” They compile data and find patterns. They have no life experience, no “hunches,” no feelings and no interpersonal relationships.
Spot on.
No creativity. No original ideas. No skepticism. No intuition. No sense of humor. AI can only imitate intelligence. How, for example, would you program a computer to be skeptical of the validity of its training material? AI can obviously be very useful for researching vast archives and summarizing information, but can it think up something completely new?
to be skeptical of the validity of its training material
As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub”
Best honest definition of “AI” still = Automated Idiocy.
Correct.
The question AI can’t answer is, “How did you solve the problem?”
And sometimes Artificial Intelligence tells lies.
Don’t expect the truth from AI. You might get it, and then again, you might not.
AI may accused you or someone you know, of sexual assault. like one did to Jonathon Turley:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-wrongly-accuses-law-professor-184500778.html
AI is not ready for primetime. One should be aware of its limitations.
The people who push solar and wind either don’t do the math, or can’t, if they continue to claim that these are somehow low cost. As they almost always require back-up of some nature, usually a combined cycle gas turbine power plant, it seems to be better to just build those plants.
As to nuclear, the only reason they take 10 years to build is due to the overly bureaucratic nature of approvals assembled, seemingly with the help of the anti-nuclear/green activist crowd, many of whom have extremely limited understanding of the risks and benefits.
The essential argument is that since they require no fuel input, thus renewable, they are low cost.
Intentional or unintentional omission of the total lifecycle costs.
But the “devices” used to capture the low density energy from breezes and sunshine are expensive, and they don’t last very long, thereby requiring serial manufacturing of the worse-than-useless crap.
With, of course, all of the energy inputs coming from coal, oil and gas.
These same advocates claim that wind and solar are the lowest-cost generators of electricity
but also demand that huge federal subsidies must continue.
This says it all (with my emphasis).
If it were truly lowest cost companies would be flocking to get involved with their own money.
The only thing that “Costs the Least” about Solar and Wind is their “Part Time”, subject to the vagaries of weather Fuel source.
If the Sun dims, or at night, you can’t add more sun to make demand.
If the wind is outside the goldilocks zone, too strong or too slow, you can’t diminish it or add more.
Wind and Solar are Mineral Intensive, Acreage extensive, extremely fragile, short lived, part time energy sources that are best used for recharging batteries.
Seems an omission that hail and tornados and hurricanes can be quite good at knocking those obscenities offline. And the landfill issues? Worse than plastics.
Best used STRICTLY “off-grid.”
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Build a worse-than-useless, but politically favored, mousetrap and grifters will beat a path to your door to “invest” in the government sponsored theft.
I wish I had said that.
It looks like AGW is going out of style with a whimper, not a bang. That’s OK, better than nothing.
I hope many of you monetized the handwriting on the wall. Bought stock in two domestic natural gas suppliers, one coal producer, and a natural gas fund last March. Up around 20% and the summer peak has yet to begin. Yeah, the schadenfreude kicks in when you see companies like Sunpower go tits up, but making money at the same time by not buying into the scam is so much better.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The insanity will continue until sufficient damage is accrued.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
(by the Climate Borg)
I hope you are correct, but DJT signed up for offshore wind in NY State and $120 million to seek rare earths for magnets in Greenland. Those are not the actions of a well-informed and advised president.
The offshore wind was part of a deal to allow natural gas pipeline construction through the state of NY to serve New England. If NY wants to toss their money into the wind, let ’em, but give the rest of New England a chance to have sufficient NG.
AFA rare earths, their uses extend far beyond EVs:
. Defense Systems:
Rare earths like dysprosium and terbium are used in military aircraft, drones, and other defense equipment.
The President appears much more well-informed than some of his critics.
He agreed to offshore as part of a deal to get new pipelines.
Rare earth elements are used in many products, not just magnets, and magnets are used in many things, not just EVs and wind turbines.
I’d like to know what types of surveys have been conducted in countries supposedly aiming for Net Zero, and do those surveys emphasize that to achieve that target, the cost of energy would not only rise but also be less reliable. Some of the ones I’ve seen show that support for Net Zero drops precipitously as soon as the costs, restrictions, and inconveniences of it are revealed. It’s similar to EV sales which drop like the proverbial stone once government subsidies are removed. The reality is that reaching Net Zero is a low priority among most consumers, and when governments start removing carbon pricing as elections approach, there’s no great urgency for them to retain it either, particularly if it cost them votes.
Support for Net Zero plummets when consumers see their electricity bills.
Trying to do the impossible gets expensive.
Remove all wind and solar from the grid. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators.
Net Zero is failing everywhere. It’s just that there is more freedom of speech in the US, so word is getting out faster.
Just noting that the wind and solar share of electricity has grown significantly over the past years of mandates, preferences and subsidies. And you know in places like California and Massachusetts, that’s a reason to quadruple down on mandates, preferences and subsidies.
To put all of our energy eggs in one government dependent, exorbitantly expensive, lithium yellow basket.