Democrats Don’t Price The Loss When It Comes To The Green Energy Grid
In the insurance business, they price the loss before they sell the policy. Nobody writes coverage, leaves the deductible blank and doesn’t account for possible losses.
Frank Lasee·Oct 26, 2026·5 min read
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In the insurance business, they price the loss before they sell the policy. Nobody writes coverage, leaves the deductible blank and doesn’t account for possible losses.
Yet that is how Democrats’ climate policies plan the grid. Every wind-and-solar plan prices building wind and solar, not the other costs they create: battery backup, transmission wires, substations, infrastructure and dispatchable power to keep the lights on when they don’t. They also don’t price what happens when our grids fail.
Economists do have a number. It is called the value of lost load: the cost to families and businesses of power that isn’t there when they need it. A 2024 study for the Texas grid operator put it at roughly $35,000 per megawatt-hour for a one-hour outage.
Wind can sell power for around $30 a megawatt-hour. Failing to deliver it can cost more than a thousand times that.
Texas learned the lesson in February 2021. Winter Storm Uri caused at least 246 deaths and the state comptroller estimated the economic loss at $80 billion to $130 billion. Civil engineers put it as high as $300 billion.
Uri was not just a wind and solar failure; their output dropped dramatically. The storm
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Democrats Don’t Price The Loss When It Comes To The Green Energy Grid — IJR
their output by 500% because wind and solar weren’t there before tripping off. The more a grid leans on weather, the less room it has when the weather turns.
Now run the numbers on a real project. Microsoft says the first phase of its Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, data center needs about 450 megawatts around the clock. The nearby Paris Solar-Battery Park has a battery that holds 440 megawatt-hours, less than one hour of that load.
At the Texas figure, one hour of 450 megawatts going unserved is about $15.8 million. That is an illustration, not a forecast and the value per megawatt-hour falls as outages lengthen. But it shows the scale of what a plan leaves off the ledger.
Carrying that load through five gray January days on batteries would take roughly 54,000 megawatt-hours, more than 120 Paris-sized batteries. The federal energy laboratory puts a four-hour battery system at $334 per kilowatt-hour in 2024, and $366 in 2026 in its high case. At those prices, the batteries alone total nearly $20 billion, before transmission, charging losses, and replacement. The estimate predates the 2025 tariff changes.
Germany shows how a dry spell plays out. A week-long Dunkelflaute, German for dark doldrums, hit in November 2024. Renewables fell to about 30 percent of supply, and baseload power reached 145 euros per megawatt-hour, up from a typical 40, because electricity was in short supply.
Germany kept the lights on by firing up natural gas and coal plants and importing an average of 10.5 gigawatts. The Midwest grid won’t get the same relief. When a cold, still week depresses wind and solar output across the region, its neighbors will be just as short of power.
Because of climate ideology, we have been closing reliable, on-demand coal plants before their useful lives end and replacing them with intermittent wind and solar. This is leaving us short of electricity and driving up prices for everyone. This is the Democrats’ policies, and they want to impose more climate policies on us forever.
Then there are the wires. A Texas Public Policy Foundation analysis estimates Texans pay about $1 billion a year for transmission built to support wind and solar, nearly $15 billion since 2010.
In the Midwest, Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) approved a $21.8 billion transmission package with regional cost sharing (socialization) to move wind power. Five state utility commissions challenged it in a federal complaint, and their consultant put the benefits at $4.3 billion to $7.2 billion, well below MISO’s claim of up to $72 billion.
The fix starts with a simple rule. Any plan that mandates a share of wind and solar, or retires a dispatchable plant, should show the cost of the whole system, not just the new wind and solar generation.
It should also show the cost of failure when wind and solar don’t deliver, alongside the cost of building.
A plan that prices the build without all the costs, and the grid failures that become more likely with intermittency, is not a plan. It is a policy with a blank deductible and very high costs.
Price the outage and the true costs first. Then build.
Democrats complain about the “very high costs of gas,” but building out wind and solar won’t lower the price at the pump or reduce your electricity bills.
Frank Lasee is a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that champions free markets, property rights andinnovation as the keys to protecting both people and the environment.
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