This is a given: Solar power and wind power don’t work.
The problem with saying this – out loud – is that immediately, there will be choruses of voices shouting “But they DO work!” – voices who will cite personal data to back it up.
We all have friends with solar panels on their homes or workplaces. We all know of a business or school building that’s powered by a wind turbine.
And we have all used solar lights in our gardens, solar calculators at our desks, all of which work just fine without ever needing a battery.
So this makes it look like we’re lying when we say that solar and wind don’t work.
But the truth is, neither of us have to be wrong; we are just looking at the question from different perspectives.
For a different perspective, consider the imposition of Light Rail public transit, on the downtown of a midsized city like Milwaukee. Wisconsin Republicans spent decades arguing against the Wisconsin Left’s fever dream, and finally lost the battle. Milwaukee’s downtown light rail system, known as “The Hop,” was finally installed and set in motion a few years ago.
Walk or drive through Milwaukee today, and you will see The Hop happily rolling around downtown – endangering pedestrians, drivers and cyclists, crowding out buses, making it altogether harder for everyone else to get around – but it’s there, nevertheless, fully operational. It runs, it carries a couple of people, it seems to be working just fine.
The problem is that it cost a mint. It would have been cheaper to just buy a car – yes, to buy a car – for every single person who rides the silly thing. So it is in operation, yes, functioning as intended, but it can not – and will never – attract enough paying ridership to pay for itself. After several years of failure, the city just decided to make it totally free to ride; they charge nothing at all for tickets; city, state, and federal taxpayers just absorb the entire burden.
So, to ask whether The Hop – or any other such recently created light rail system really “works” or not – one must define the term. What do we really mean when we ask if it works?
With such public transit examples, it’s easy to analyze. It “works” for the riders who use it, paying a dollar or two per ride (or “getting it for free,” as in Milwaukee) on a system that costs infinitely more millions to build and operate than it will ever earn in fares. So it works fine for the riders, but it doesn’t work at all for the taxpayers. Asking whether it works depends on whether you mean “for a few users,” or “for society in general.”
And so it must be with wind and solar. It’s not enough to ask, “Do they produce energy?” because, to be honest, of course they do. The sun shines; the wind blows. If you harness them, you have energy. The question is the cost and method of the harnessing. Does it work as public policy? Is it cost-effective compared to the other options out there?
Many of us who write about public policy and economics fight this battle all the time, sometimes so much so that we give up writing about it. The nation is full of wind and solar farms; millions can honestly claim to get their energy from these things. When you say “the math doesn’t work,” they have good reason to think you’re mistaken, or that you’re just shilling for the traditional energy companies.
But when you do the math – the real math, the “big picture” math – you find that wind and solar energy cost about seven times as much as traditional sources like gas, coal, oil and nuclear power plants.
So why doesn’t it feel that way to the users?
Because they only directly pay a fraction of the actual cost.
The issue isn’t just that wind and solar are subsidized, it’s that they are subsidized in so many different ways, at so many different levels, making it difficult to see all the outrageous government support.
- The factories get federal grants to do the research and build the panels or turbine blades, sometimes grants for different plants making different stages of the product.
- Since so much of this technology comes from China, the Chinese government funds much of it to flood the world with these things (their standard practice in many industries, known to economists as “dumping”).
- The utilities get tax credits for offering the option.
- The homeowner or farmer either gets paid directly or gets a tax credit for participating.
- Even the installers often get a piece of this pie, perhaps just because everyone else does, so it wouldn’t be fair to leave them out.
Remove all the subsidies, and their true cost will be revealed – but the green agenda has been to decommission traditional energy plants so fast that, by then, there will be no going back.
The solar and wind efforts have been accelerated. The Obama and Biden regimes pushed them so hard because they knew that their true cost couldn’t be hidden forever; they had to get these in place before the public was onto them.
Wind is in many ways worse than solar; both are about equally costly, and neither product is remotely recyclable, so the broken ones will fill landfills until the end of time. But at least a homeowner or farmer hasn’t permanently ruined his house or farm by installing solar panels; as expensive as they are to remove, they don’t render their location unusable in future. Wind turbines, on the other hand, leave massive, deep, virtually unremovable 60’ diameter bases of two million pounds of permanent reinforced concrete behind; every single decommissioned turbine leaves behind an acre of land that can never be farmed again. Never.
Why on earth would people support such things? Only because of how cleverly the costs have been disguised.
One of the bonuses of the Trump administration is the way that DOGE and so many of the various cabinet secretaries are lifting the lid off the gross overspending and wild financial shenanigans that are rampant in our government.
Nobody knows exactly how much a single college education costs, because of how college operational costs are split up. In addition to students’ tuition, colleges get alumni donations, sporting event revenue, federal research grants, federal student grants, student loans, massive corporate donations, and even donations from hostile foreign governments (no wonder our colleges produce graduates who like Qatar and China so much).
By the same token, nobody who uses wind or solar power really knows how much that power actually costs. But we have seen reports of the billions that DOGE has revealed, the billions in gifts and grants and payoffs that the Biden-Harris era Departments of Energy and Transportation spread around the country to make foolish cities and counties look whole despite saddling their constituents with countless solar panels, electric buses, and wind farms.
Nobody knows exactly what the green agenda costs; all we know is that we’re slowly going bankrupt, and that the standard of living of the average middle class and skilled labor worker has plummeted in recent decades.
Our lives run on energy, so yes, energy costs are a big part of this problem.
Rather than paying for our power in a single utility bill, electricity is handled in this complex mix of subsidized source upon subsidized source. The user thinks he’s getting such a great deal, not realizing that his fellow taxpayers are paying the lion’s share of his bill.
And one day – probably in the not-too-distant future – this bill for decades of grossly subsidized wind and solar energy will come due.
Ripping off this bandage will be painful, but the sooner it happens, the less damage it will have done.
Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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