How many Coloradans will green energy kill?

Freedom Unaffiliated

How many Coloradans will green energy kill?

By Jon Caldara

How many people might green energy kill this summer?

If you are reading this column in a comfortably air-conditioned room on a stifling hot day, thank fossil fuels.

I’ll spell it out: Green energy is weather-dependent. And, though Colorado recently baked with triple digit temperatures, there was little wind blowing to spin windmills that would normally provide 28% of our energy.

True, the wind might be blowing in some other area of the country, and some of that electricity might make it to Colorado, but during a nationwide hot spell most of that wind power is gobbled up where it’s made.

About 63% of electricity generated in Colorado comes from fossil fuels, mostly coal or natural gas. That’s right, your tax-subsidized, virtue-signaling Tesla, the one you just had to buy the “electric vehicle” vanity license plates for to make sure we all know your Telsa is electric, runs mostly off fossil fuels — you know like a freakin’ car.

And those ugly fuels were the only thing keeping your lights on and your beer cold during the heat wave.

For many Coloradans it’s not just a glass of Chablis that fossil fuels cool. Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people, including the handicapped and elderly who need air conditioning, refrigeration to keep their medications and food safe, their medical devices such as respirators and oxygen-concentrator machines operating — well, for these people, power outages aren’t an inconvenience. They are a threat to existence.

That’s why Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy & Finance is now giving away “free” battery backup systems to Medicaid recipients — so they don’t die.

That’s worth pondering. Because of the growing likelihood of power failure from Colorado’s ridiculous green-energy policies, we must take money that could have been spent on health care for the poor to instead buy them bulky battery backup systems. This is just another one of the thousand ways green energy hides its real cost.

As Colorado’s 100% mandate for renewable energy grows, the coming years will only become more deadly.

Let’s be clear: Lawmakers are responsible for the death that is approaching. This recent heatwave and its run on power should serve as a harbinger of what is to come.

Xcel Energy has already warned they might be asking customers to turn off power because they simply cannot provide what is needed. And now with “Smart Meters” on every home, they won’t need to ask. They could just cut you off when they want your power elsewhere (thus, the back-up batteries for Medicaid).

When energy is needed the most, weather-reliant power generation fails the most — heat spells with no wind, cold spells with no sunshine to power solar panels, and, as has happened recently, hailstorms destroying acres of solar panels.

And that’s with only a third of Colorado’s power coming from unreliable, finicky, persnickety, weather-dependent energy generation. What happens when the lawmakers’ mandate of 100% renewables becomes more real?

People. Will. Die.

Coal plants are required to have, on average, 90 days’ worth of fuel on site. It would take a weather event of three months of coal trains not working to run out of fuel. Whereas it only takes the sun not shining or the wind not blowing for minutes to put us into crisis.

Even the chief executive of the Colorado Springs utility, Travas Deal, can’t hide the cost saying, “Meeting state requirements for clean energy is costly and ratepayers will continue seeing the impacts on their monthly bills.”

On the green mandates they’ve so far survived, he said, “We thought 80% was a good start toward being a cleaner utility and a cleaner state … this next level, though … we don’t have the technology for that yet, and the financial impacts are going to be extreme.”

But the price isn’t just financial. The price will be in human life when the rolling blackouts come. And come they will.

Forget keeping energy somehow reliable and affordable, if we want to save human life in Colorado, we have a hard choice coming.

Either we scale back the mandates for green, weather-dependent power or we build nuclear power facilities which are zero emission and not weather dependent.

We can deny reality for a surprisingly long amount of time, but sooner or later reality hits.

We will be forced into reducing green mandates or building nuclear power.

The sooner we choose the more lives saved, if that matters to you.