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.

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 froze gas fields and coal plants, which increased 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.