Government making us use play-like energy forms will consign us to a cold, dark future

 Per the Washington Free Beacon:

President Joe Biden's aggressive climate regulations targeting fossil-fuel-fired power plants will create widespread electric grid instability and lead to mass blackouts impacting millions of Americans, according to a recent studycommissioned by North Dakota's state government.

The research, conducted in May by the firm Always On Energy Research, concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized regulations are not technologically feasible and will foreseeably lead to the retirement of coal power generation units. Intermittent and weather-dependent green energy sources, such as wind and solar, will replace such retired generators, leading to unreliable conditions, the study found.

The study largely echoes concerns that have been voiced by the U.S. grid watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; regional grid operators; and power utility companies. Four regional grid operators that oversee the infrastructure supplying power for 154 million Americans warnedafter the EPA regulations were first proposed last year that grid reliability would "dwindle to concerning levels" under the regulations. The Edison Electric Institute, the lead industry group representing U.S. electric companies, in late May joined a lawsuit that challenged the EPA's finalized regulations.

"Biden's Green Agenda is shutting down baseload power and is rapidly destabilizing our electrical grid. Electricity costs are up 30% under Biden already," North Dakota governor Doug Burgum (R.) told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement. "Prices will continue to skyrocket if he's re-elected as real power demand increases dramatically for the first time in decades—for chip manufacturing and new foundational industries like AI."

Burgum, a member of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which commissioned the study, added that Biden's regulatory regime will reduce power supplies, leading to "higher prices AND less reliability."

There's a dive into some numbers so we can compare and contrast:

Solar panels, for example, produce just 25 percent and wind turbines produce 34 percent of their listed capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Coal and natural gas plants, meanwhile, respectively produce 49 percent and 54 percent of their listed capacity.

Factoring in that disparity, Always On Energy Research concluded the grid across the majority of the Midwest would experience nearly 9 million megawatt hours of unserved load, leading to blackouts costing tens of billions of dollars.

"The EPA power plant rule is exactly the wrong thing to be doing for grid reliability right now," Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon. "To be intentionally closing and, essentially, banning the facilities that are keeping the grid functioning while, at the same time, in other ways, encouraging the penetration on the grid of things like wind and solar that are making the grid less reliable is going to have incredibly poor aftereffects."

Nationwide, natural gas plants generated roughly 43 percent of total electricity produced in 2023 while coal plants generated another 16 percent, according to additional Energy Information Administration data. By comparison, wind power generated 10 percent of total electricity in the United States, and solar produced less than 6 percent.

But let's not conclude on a note of making this the main point.

The main point is that government has no effing business getting between producers and consumers of energy and limiting the two parties' options as they desire to come to an agreement - that is, a transaction. 

The pointy-headed overlords don't think we have the individual capacity to make decisions that serve our own best interests. 

The EPA will make the lights flicker, cost us an arm and a leg, and greatly erode the second most precious thing we have as human beings (after our lives): our freedom.