The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released its annual “Resource Adequacy Report,” earlier this month, and it warns that blackouts are coming if the country carries out the Biden-era plan to retire fossil fuel power plants. That is not sitting well with climate activists.
The report’s executive summary opens with a declaration that the U.S. possesses “abundant energy sources and capabilities such as oil and gas, coal, and nuclear.” It warns that the speed at which utilities are retiring fossil fuel-powered generators and replacing them with unreliable and intermittent wind and solar power threatens to increase the risk of power outages by 100X in 2030.
“This report affirms what we already know: The United States cannot afford to continue down the unstable and dangerous path of energy subtraction previous leaders pursued, forcing the closure of baseload power sources like coal and natural gas,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
The Biden-Harris administration’s report in April 2024 under then-Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm took on a noticeably different tone. Their executive summary warned that relying on fossil fuel resources to meet reliability requirements is “risky,” and natural gas generators should be replaced with hydrogen or fitted with carbon capture, a technology DOE engineers warned wasn’t affordable or scalable. Granholm’s report mentioned climate change 14 times, but the Trump administration’s report doesn’t mention it at all.
Hellbound and Down 