Economy
‘Gambling With The Grid’: New Data Highlights Achilles’ Heel Of One Of Biden’s Favorite Green Power Sources
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By NICK POPE
New government data shows that wind power generation fell in 2023 despite the addition of new capacity, a fact that energy sector experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation demonstrates its inherent flaw.
Wind generation fell by about 2.1% in 2023 relative to 2022 generation, despite the 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity that came online last year, according to data published Tuesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That wind power output dropped despite new capacity coming online and the availability of government subsidies highlights its intermittency and the problems wind power could pose for grid reliability, energy sector experts told the DCNF.
The decrease in wind generation is the first drop on record with the EIA since the 1990s; the drop was not evenly distributed across all regions of the U.S., and slower wind speeds last year also contributed to the decline, according to EIA. The Biden administration wants to have the American power sector reach carbon neutrality by 2035, a goal that will require a significant shift away from natural gas- and coal-fired power toward wind, solar and other green sources.
A table depicting the decrease of wind power generation in 2023 relative to 2022. (Screenshot via U.S. Energy Information Administration)
“Relying on wind power to meet your peak electricity demands is gambling with the grid,” Isaac Orr, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment who specializes in power grid-related analysis, told the DCNF. “Will the wind blow, or won’t it? This should be a moment where policymakers step back and consider the wisdom of heavily subsidizing intermittent generators and punishing reliable coal and gas plants with onerous regulations.”
Between 2016 and 2022, the wind industry received an estimated $18.6 billion worth of subsidies, about 10% of the total amount of subsidies extended to the energy sector by the U.S. government, according to an August 2023 EIA report. Wind power received more assistance from the government than nuclear power, coal or natural gas over the same period of time.
“This isn’t subsidies per kilowatt hour of generation. It’s raw subsidies. If it were per kilowatt hour of generation, the numbers would be even more extreme,” Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “This is a massive amount of money. It’s enough to dramatically alter energy investment decisions for the worse. We’re much more heavily subsidizing the sources that don’t provide a significant portion of our electricity than those that do.”
“Policy that just focuses on installed capacity, rather than the reliability of that capacity, fails to understand the real needs of the electrical grid,” Lambermont added. “This recent disparity illustra
Wind power’s performance was especially lackluster in the upper midwest, but Texas saw more wind generation in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to EIA. Wind generation in the first half of 2023 was about 14% lower than it was through the first six months of 2022, but generation was higher toward the end of 2023 than it was during the same period in 2022.
In 2023, about 60% of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from fossil fuels, while 10% came from wind power, according to EIA data. Beyond generous subsidies for preferred green energy sources, the Biden administration has also aggressively regulated fossil fuels and American power plants to advance its broad climate agenda.
Biden’s Climate Bill Boosted An Offshore Wind Giant, But His Economy Brought It To The Brink https://t.co/AF7SPT2FNu
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 3, 2023
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) landmark power plant rules finalized this month will threaten grid reliability if enacted, partially because the regulations are likely to incentivize operators to close plants rather than adopt the costly measures required for compliance, grid experts previously told the DCNF. At the same time that the Biden administration is effectively trying to shift power generation away from fossil fuels, it is also pursuing goals — such as substantially boosting electric vehicle adoption over the next decade and incentivizing construction of energy-intensive computer chip factories — that are driving up projected electricity demand in the future.
“The EIA data proves what we’ve always known about wind power: It is intermittent, unpredictable and unreliable,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the DCNF. “Any power generation source whose output is wholly dependent on equally unpredictable weather conditions should never be presented by power companies and grid managers as safe replacements for abundant, cheap, dispatchable generation fueled with natural gas, coal or nuclear. This is a simple reality that people in charge of our power grids too often forget. Saying that no doubt hurts some people’s feelings, but nature really does not care about our feelings.”
Blackmon also pointed out that, aside from its intermittency, sluggish build-out of the transmission lines and related infrastructure poses a major problem for wind power.
“Wind power is worthless without accompanying transmission, yet the Biden administration continues to pour billions into unreliable wind while ignoring the growing crisis in the transmission sector,” Blackmon told the DCNF.
Another long-term issue that wind power, as well as solar power, faces is the need for a massive expansion in the amount of battery storage available to store and dispatch energy from intermittent sources as market conditions dictate. By some estimates, the U.S. will need about 85 times as much battery storage by 2050 relative to November 2023 in order to fully decarbonize the power grid, according to Alsym Energy, a battery company.
The White House and the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment.
It finally happened. Canada received a federal budget earlier this month, after more than a year without one. It’s far from a budget that’s great. It’s far from what many expected and distant from what the country needs. But it still passed.
With the budget vote drama now behind us, there may be space for some general observations beyond the details of the concerning deficits and debt. What kind of budget did Canada get?
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For a government that built its political identity on social-program expansion and moralized spending, Budget 2025 arrives wearing borrowed clothing. It speaks in the language of productivity, infrastructure, and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, yet keeps the full spending reflex of the Trudeau era. The result feels like a cabinet trying to change its fiscal costume without changing the character inside it. Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this same rhetoric before lead to nothing. So, I remain skeptical of what they say and how they say it.
The government insists it has found a new path, one where public investment leads private growth. That sounds bold. However, it is more a rebranding than a reform. It is a shift in vocabulary, not in discipline.
A comparison with past eras makes this clear.
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budgets were cut deeply, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. The Chrétien years were unsentimental. Political capital was spent so financial capital could return. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. Nothing in this plan resembles the structural surgery of the mid 1990s.
Stephen Harper, by contrast, treated balanced budgets as policy and principle. Even during the global financial crisis, his government used stimulus as a bridge, not a way of life. It cut taxes widely and consistently, limited public service growth, and placed the long-term burden on restraint rather than rhetoric. Budget 2025 nods toward Harper’s focus on productivity and capital assets, yet it rejects the tax relief and spending controls that made his budgets coherent.
Then there is Justin Trudeau, the high tide of redistribution, vacuous identity politics, and deficit-as-virtue posturing. Ottawa expanded into an ideological planner for everything, including housing, climate, childcare, inclusion portfolios, and every new identity category. Much of that ideological scaffolding consisted of mere words, weakening the principle of equality under the law and encouraging the government to referee culture rather than administer policy.
Budget 2025 is the first hint of retreat from that style. The identity program fireworks are dimmer, though they have not disappeared. The social policy boosterism is quieter. Perhaps fiscal gravity has begun to whisper in the prime minister’s ear.
However, one cannot confuse tone for transformation.
Spending is still vast. Deficits grew. The new fiscal anchor, balancing only the operating budget, is weaker than the one it replaced. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale that economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. The budget announces new funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds. These are presented as productivity measures, yet they continue the Trudeau-era instinct to centralize housing policy rather than fix the levers that matter. Permitting delays, zoning rigidity, municipal approvals, and labour shortages continue to slow actual construction. Ottawa spends, but the foundations still cure at the same pace.
Defence spending tells the same story. Budget 2025 offers incremental funding and some procurement gestures, but it avoids the core problem: Canada’s procurement system is broken. Delays stretch across decades. Projects become obsolete before contracts are signed. The system cannot buy a ship, an aircraft, or an armoured vehicle without cost overruns and missed timelines. Spending more through this machinery will waste time and money. It adds motion, not capability.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax competitiveness agenda, no strategy for shrinking a federal bureaucracy that has grown faster than the economy it governs. Ottawa presides over a low-productivity country but insists that a new accounting framework will solve what decades of overregulation and policy clutter have created. More bluster.
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From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation, energy, mining, agriculture, and transportation receives more rhetorical respect in Budget 2025, yet the same regulatory thicket that blocks pipelines and mines remains intact. The government praises capital formation but still undermines the key sectors that generate it.
Budget 2025 tries to walk like Chrétien and talk like Harper while spending like Trudeau. That is not a transformation; it is a costume change. The country needed a budget that prioritized growth rooted in tangible assets and real productivity. What it got instead is a rhetorical turn without the courage to cut, streamline, or reform.
Canada does not require a new budgeting vocabulary. It requires a government willing to govern in the best interest of the country.
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From the Fraser Institute
By Tegan Hill and Elmira Aliakbari
On the campaign trail and after he became prime minister, Mark Carney has repeatedly promised to make Canada an “energy superpower.” But, as evidenced by its first budget, the Carney government has simply reaffirmed the failed plans of the past decade and embraced the damaging energy policies of the Trudeau government.
First, consider the Trudeau government’s policy legacy. There’s Bill C-69 (the “no pipelines act”), the new electricity regulations (which aim to phase out natural gas as a power source starting this year), Bill C-48 (which bans large oil tankers off British Columbia’s northern coast and limit Canadian exports to international markets), the cap on emissions only from the oil and gas sector (even though greenhouse gas emissions have the same effect on the environment regardless of the source), stricter regulations for methane emissions (again, impacting the oil and gas sector), and numerous “net-zero” policies.
According to a recent analysis, fully implementing these measures under Trudeau government’s emissions reduction plan would result in 164,000 job losses and shrink Canada’s economic output by 6.2 per cent by the end of the decade compared to a scenario where we don’t have these policies in effect. For Canadian workers, this will mean losing $6,700 (annually, on average) by 2030.
Unfortunately, the Carney government’s budget offers no retreat from these damaging policies. While Carney scrapped the consumer carbon tax, he plans to “strengthen” the carbon tax on industrial emitters and the cost will be passed along to everyday Canadians—so the carbon tax will still cost you, it just won’t be visible.
There’s also been a lot of buzz over the possible removal of the oil and gas emissions cap. But to be clear, the budget reads: “Effective carbon markets, enhanced oil and gas methane regulations, and the deployment at scale of technologies such as carbon capture and storage would create the circumstances whereby the oil and gas emissions cap would no longer be required as it would have marginal value in reducing emissions.” Put simply, the cap remains in place, and based on the budget, the government has no real plans to remove it.
Again, the cap singles out one source (the oil and gas sector) of carbon emissions, even when reducing emissions in other sectors may come at a lower cost. For example, suppose it costs $100 to reduce a tonne of emissions from the oil and gas sector, but in another sector, it costs only $25 a tonne. Why force emissions reductions in a single sector that may come at a higher cost? An emission is an emission regardless of were it comes from. Moreover, like all these policies, the cap will likely shrink the Canadian economy. According to a 2024 Deloitte study, from 2030 to 2040, the cap will shrink the Canadian economy (measured by inflation-adjusted GDP) by $280 billion, and result in lower wages, job losses and a decline in tax revenue.
At the same time, the Carney government plans to continue to throw money at a range of “green” spending and tax initiatives. But since 2014, the combined spending and forgone revenue (due to tax credits, etc.) by Ottawa and provincial governments in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta totals at least $158 billion to promote the so-called “green economy.” Yet despite this massive spending, the green sector’s contribution to Canada’s economy has barely changed, from 3.1 per cent of Canada’s economic output in 2014 to 3.6 per cent in 2023.
In his first budget, Prime Minister Carney largely stuck to the Trudeau government playbook on energy and climate policy. Ottawa will continue to funnel taxpayer dollars to the “green economy” while restricting the oil and gas sector and hamstringing Canada’s economic potential. So much for becoming an energy superpower.
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