The Biden Administration thinks “turn everything electric” is how you solve energy problems, convince China to stop polluting, reverse God’s climate control, and make us safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. As cars are forced electric, gas-based appliances banned, and the nation’s energy eggs put in one basket – the power grid – someone needs to ask: Is this smart?
Answer, no. Biden’s dumb energy policy is folly. Here is why. Everywhere you turn, the Administration – like religious zealots – is converting things to electric power, which means loading up the old power grid.
After using federal money to distort the free market and induce states, companies, and consumers to shift to costly, rapidly degrading, insufficient solar and wind sources, they now turn to mass regulation, pushing mandates faster and further than any time in history.
This Administration, reinforced by states pulling federal money, has set in motion bans on everything from gas-powered cars, trucks, and stoves to refrigerators, lawnmowers, and (now) water heaters. They push it to the grid, 60 percent fossil fuel driven, 18 percent nuclear.
Put aside the illogic, hypocrisy, and self-defeating notion that the grid is “clean” electricity, somehow cleaner than the gas we put in our cars, or that this does not come with a massive infrastructure price tag.
Put aside the idea that electrifying everything – replacing individually-determined, diverse sources with just one – is wildly costly. It forces us to abandon a hundred years of energy distribution infrastructure.
Put aside the lunacy of imagining that if we do this crazy thing, China will follow us. They surely will not. They do not care one iota about the environment or human rights. If we cannot stop them from militarizing the seas, heavens, and our own air space, cannot get them to put in a hotline to avert accidental war, what in God’s name makes anyone think they will follow us to high energy vulnerability?
The point: Pushing everything to the grid, already wobbly, risks a nationwide, cascading power collapse. Having all our eggs in one basket is dangerous – and anyone thinking non-ideologically can see the folly.
Before we start this Rube Goldberg electrification machine, an illogical experiment in mass transition from multiple available power sources to one grand “all things electric” scheme, consider facts.
The national power grid is a give-and-go regional system, Eastern Interconnection feeding states east of the Rockies, Western Interconnection states westward except Texas, which is fed by the Texas Interconnected system. All of these systems are old, vulnerable, maxed out.
The grid is 7,300 aging powerplants, 160,000 miles of aging high-voltage powerlines, millions of miles of low voltage lines and transformers, powering what lets you read this, plus heat, light, food, everything.
To say we are already vulnerable – without creating more dependence – is an understatement. The grid is highly vulnerable to internal and external threats, accidental and intentional, cyber to sun storms.
Moreover, the system is like a two-way river. When a region gets low on energy, another backfills, but if the system is hit hard, that impact can cascade, creating nationwide vulnerability. Why? Energy runs everything. Everything depends on it, life support to emergency response, transportation and lighting to medicine and sewage removal. If an event – including grid overload – shuts things down, they all go.
While this has been studied, the combination of cyber vulnerability, terrorist, criminal, or political attacks, and natural disasters is growing. Do the math on combined vulnerabilities, and our reliance on an aging, uncertain, centralized source of power is scary. To increase it is downright foolhardy.
Other facts: 70 percent of the grid’s transmission lines are 30 years old, at end of life. 60 percent of circuit breakers are older than that, already almost twice their foreseen lifespan. Even before GPS vulnerabilities, cyberattacks are up. They present a tangible threat, especially from China and Russia. From ransomware to selective shutdowns, they affect national security beyond public access to energy.
The threat presented by shifting everything to the grid should be obvious. It raises the chances of a catastrophic, cascading event. Chances are, even before higher reliance, rising. In 2022, physical attacks on the grid, potentially foreign and domestic, anarchistic and political, jumped 77 percent.
Even before Biden’s crazy, political bans, mandates, and efforts to coerce reliance on the grid, we are in trouble. Before these get irreversible – and the illogic is hurtling toward us – serious thinkers say stop.
Loss of the grid from any reason would be catastrophic, imperiling access to life-saving energy and flinging the doors open to national security threats. Everything – including responding – depends on energy, that would be missing. Nonpolitical analyses say “casualties could run into the millions.”
Bottom line: Biden’s energy policy is pure folly, an unforgivable gamble. The mandatory, undemocratic, costly, illogical electrification of everything – puts Americans in jeopardy. It is dumb and dangerous.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
