From THE DAILY CALLER

Bonner Cohen
Author, Fixing America’s Crumbling Underground Infrastructure

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to “pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.” In fact, while serving as vice president, Harris played a key role in enacting legislation that increased the cost of living for all Americans.

When President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on Aug. 16, 2022, he said that it was “one of the most significant laws in our history.”

That was no exaggeration.

Contrary to its label, the law had nothing to do with reducing inflation. In fact, it would soon drive-up prices for such essentials as food, electricity and transportation. The IRA is the administration’s signature energy-transition initiative, with a few provisions strengthening the government’s role in healthcare and an expansion in the number of IRS employees thrown in for good measure. Passage was a close call, with Harris casting the deciding vote in a Senate that was deadlocked 50-50. (RELATED: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: Biden’s Climate Bill Turns Two Years Old)

Sold to the American public as a vehicle to combat the “climate crisis,” the IRA’s backers put the price tag at $750 billion. But by April 2023, Goldman Sachs calculated the costs of the statute’s subsidies and other handouts at $1.2 trillion over ten years. In truth, the IRA’s costs cannot be measured in dollars and cents, because the law’s effect on the lives of ordinary citizens, the viability of the U.S. economy and American national security are so profound as to defy quantification.

At the core of the IRA are lavish handouts to politically favored industries and organizations, paid for by taxpayers, most of whom will see their quality-of-life decline as the law tightens its grip on the nation’s energy sector. In its push to rid the country of fossil fuels, for example, the law expands subsidies for notoriously inefficient offshore wind turbines at a time of high-profile cancellation of several ocean-borne wind projects off the Atlantic Coast due to rising costs and resistance from coastal residents.

Rigging the game against gasoline-powered cars, the IRA extends the $7,500 tax credit for purchases of new electric vehicles (EVs) to include point-of-sale discounts, provided the EVs and their batteries have been assembled within the United States and the minerals in the batteries are sourced from the United States or from countries with free-trade agreements in place.

Yet, despite the favorable treatment lavished on EVs by the IRA, sales of the vehicles have stalled, an ominous sign for U.S. autoworkers, who are being transitioned to make cars the driving public continues to shun and whose assembly already requires a smaller workforce. EVs currently make up 6.8 percent of new sales, meaning that over 93 percent of buyers are sticking with gas-powered cars. People purchasing traditional vehicles, however, are nevertheless subsidizing the sale of EVs through the federal taxes they pay.

America’s already shaky power grid will also be at the not-so-tender mercies of the IRA. In a publication titled “Building a Clean Energy Economy: A Guidebook to the Inflation Reduction Act’s Investments in Clean Energy and Climate Action,” updated in January 2023, the White House boasted that the IRA “invests nearly $3 billion in the U.S. transmission system to help overcome the financial and permitting challenges that hinder the build-out of high-capacity lines. These investments will not only address critical vulnerabilities but also connect Americans to cleaner and cheaper power, advancing the Biden-Harris Administration’s ambitious goal of 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.”

But therein lies the problem. The power sources the IRA favors — wind and solar — are neither clean nor cheap, nor are they in any way reliable. Dead wind turbines and solar panels, laden with toxic chemicals, are destined for landfills across the country, transforming each dump into a potential mini-Superfund site. They are “cheap” only because they are propped up by taxpayers, and even with the handouts, wind and solar cannot compete with natural gas, which is at its lowest price in years.

Feeding the electric grid a steady diet of intermittent power will only increase its vulnerability. In an Aug. 16 coalition letter to Congress, 55 free-market and conservative organizations urged lawmakers to eliminate the IRA’s subsidies and noted the threat the law poses to the electric grid.

“The very threats to grid reliability warned about by such entities as PJM and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation are the ones actively encouraged under the statute,” the coalition wrote. “Thanks to the IRA, the American people face a greater likelihood of future blackouts – and are being made to pay for the privilege.” (RELATED: DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH: After Two Years, It’s Clear Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act Did The Exact Opposite)

The energy chaos the IRA and like-minded “climate-friendly” Biden administration regulations are unleashing on the country may temporarily benefit recipients of the IRA’s giveaways. But the law’s real beneficiary resides in Beijing. China can only marvel at how the United States is unilaterally disarming itself by abandoning its global leadership in fossil-fuel production and embracing energy sources controlled by Beijing. China has a stranglehold on the global supply chain for cobalt, lithium, graphite, nickel, copper and rare-earth elements that are the centerpiece of the energy transition the IRA is meant to promote.

Decades before the IRA was enacted, economist Friedrich Hayek captured the spirit of central planners’ “fatal conceit,” who demonstrate “how little they know about what they imagine they can design.”

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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By Rich Nolan

The U.S. Department of Energy recently made a startling admission. U.S. electricity demand is going to double by 2050 and meeting that soaring demand is going to require the equivalent of building 300 Hoover Dams.

As extraordinary as that estimate is, it’s likely far too low. In many regions of the country, utilities and grid operators are warning power demand is growing far faster and higher.

Electrification of the economy with adoption of heat pumps and electric vehicles is part of the demand sea change. So is industrial onshoring of new energy-hungry battery and semiconductor manufacturing plants. But the electricity demand gamechanger is the explosive growth of AI and the enormous data centers needed to support it.

Running an internet search using AI consumes more than ten times as much energy as a traditional Google search. And the type of processor needed to run AI uses as much power as an average American home.

The newest and largest class of data centers are so large their power demand is equal to that of a city the size of Seattle. Dozens of these facilities are now in development.

In Virginia, the nation’s data center capital, the state’s largest utility expects power demand to jump 85% in the next 15 years with power demand from data centers quadrupling.

AEP, a utility with service territory in 11 central states serving 5.6 million customers, has reported that companies representing 15 gigawatts of new power demand – mainly from data centers – are seeking connection by 2030. That’s power demand equivalent to what’s needed for 10 million homes.

With the emergence of data centers and rising industrial activity, Georgia’s main utility, Georgia Power, has boosted its demand projections sixteen-fold from a year ago.

And not to be outdone, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator for most of the state, announced this summer it expects power demand to nearly double in the state in just six years.

Across the country, utilities and grid operators are left wondering where exactly is the power going to come from?

While power demand surges, efforts to meet it are in disarray. In fact, thanks to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), many regions of the country are losing essential existing capacity faster than they can replace it.

The EPA is using a blitz of rules with impossible technology mandates to wipe out the nation’s coal power plant fleet and make it all but impossible to build new baseload coal and natural gas power plants. Rules targeting the existing natural gas fleet are also forthcoming.

And while EPA tears down the capacity we currently rely on, efforts to build new capacity are stuck in first gear. Permitting, financing and supply chain problems are tying up or derailing energy and infrastructure projects all over the country.

According to the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, roughly one-third of utility-scale wind and solar siting applications submitted over the last five years were canceled, while about half of wind and solar projects experienced significant delays.

Nationally, we’re supposed to be building thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines each year to move remote wind and solar power to demand centers. We completed just 55 miles last year.

The nation’s grid operators are now adamant we face an alarming mismatch between the power we need and what we’re going to have available. In fact, the nation’s grid reliability watchdog is already warning of blackouts for much of the country by the close of the decade. But even if the worst grid emergencies can be avoided, our self-imposed power shortages threaten immense economic damage.

We’re on a trajectory to short-circuit our own economic potential by not having the power supply available to meet new industrial demand. Tightening supplies are already reflected in prices. Electricity price inflation is now 50% higher than economy-wide inflation.

When data centers or newly proposed car or battery plants can’t find available or reasonably priced power, they simply won’t be built, leaving untold jobs and tax revenue on the table.

In just one county in Northern Virginia, tax revenue from data centers is projected to reach $1.5 billion a year by 2030. But that’s only if the data centers can find available electricity.

Meeting the enormous electricity demand now on our doorstep requires using every tool at our disposal, including the very plants EPA is determined to close.

The nation’s coal power fleet is a deeply valuable asset that can help preserve grid reliability, meet soaring demand and get us to our energy future. It’s past time for energy and regulatory policy to recognize it. Derailing the nation’s economic and industrial potential is a mistake we simply don’t have to make.

Rich Nolan is president and CEO of the National Mining Association. 

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.