The ‘Renewable’ Boondoggle

Solar and wind alone can’t give us the energy we need.

By James B. Meigs

Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

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Electricity prices are spiking, our power grid is struggling and it’s all Jimmy Carter’s fault. Well, it’s not all the late former president’s fault. But he got the ball rolling. Let me explain.

According to a January 2026 report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), “The overall resource adequacy outlook for the North American [bulk power system] is worsening.” Translation: We aren’t making enough electricity. The risk of power outages has risen in recent years, the January 2026 report concludes, even as consumers pay more.

Rising demand—from data centers, EVs and home heat pumps—is partly responsible, NERC reports. But a bigger problem is how we make electricity today. For decades, federal and state policies nudged operators to retire dependable coal, gas and nuclear plants and replace that electricity with wind and solar power. These variable, weather-dependent sources, NERC notes, “increase the complexity of planning and operating a reliable grid.”

Having a stable, robust power grid is essential to our economy and national security—not to mention to every citizen’s well-being. So, why did the U.S., along with most of Europe, pursue a policy that makes our power grid more vulnerable?

The answer lies back in the 1970s, during the dreary presidency of Jimmy Carter. The U.S. economy was struggling after a series of Middle East oil shocks. Many experts thought the world had reached “peak oil.” In his famous “Malaise Speech,” President Carter responded with a grand policy to wean the U.S. off energy imports. The country “must increasingly rely on those sources of power which are renewable,” he later told Congress, including solar, wind and biomass. Unlike fossil fuels, these would never run out, he noted. Foreign nations couldn’t embargo the wind and sun. At the time, Mr. Carter’s policy was driven less by environmental concerns than by economic nationalism. Only later would the term “renewable” become lazy shorthand for “environmentally friendly” or “low carbon.”

Thus began a five-decade experiment in industrial policy. Over that time, the federal government has spent many tens of billions of dollars on a bewildering mix of credits, mandates and subsidies boosting wind, solar and inefficient biofuels made from corn and soybeans. Most states enacted similar programs.

Our policymakers believed they knew best what kind of energy the U.S. needed, and confidently wielded carrots and sticks to make power companies comply. Many countries in Europe—Germany most notoriously—pursued the all-renewable goal even more avidly. But the renewable rubric included several pitfalls. In particular, it excluded nuclear power on the grounds that uranium ore, while plentiful, technically isn’t “renewable.” That fact gave left-wing activists cover to portray nuclear-plant shutdowns as environmental victories, even though nuclear is our most reliable, and, yes, our greenest energy source. The U.S. allowed its nuclear industry to wither, while Germany aggressively shuttered its entire nuclear fleet. Fortunately, U.S. nuclear policy improved under both presidents Biden and Trump. But by then, decades of potential progress had been lost.

How has that industrial-policy experiment worked out? At a recent Goldman Sachs conference, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright offered a kind of scorecard. Globally, about $10 trillion has been invested in the “energy transition,” he estimated. Nonetheless, only 2.6% of total global energy comes from renewable sources today. Some regions, such as Germany and California, have made wind and solar major contributors to their electric grids. But “everywhere the penetration is high, prices have gone up,” he noted, and “deindustrialization” has followed.

But wait: Haven’t we been told that wind and solar costs are plunging? Shouldn’t renewable power cost less than electricity from gas or nuclear? It’s true that wind and solar can produce very cheap power. And that’s great in moderate doses. But the minute-by-minute price of renewable electricity doesn’t account for the huge expense of integrating massive surges of wind and solar power into our current grid.

Here’s a rough analogy: Imagine a car with three engines, two of which can supply power very cheaply but have the disadvantage of turning on and off at unpredictable times. That would be a ridiculously complex machine! But that’s essentially how the power grid works in California, Germany and other regions with ample wind and solar. Sometimes, solar panels produce more power than the grid needs; at other times, wind dominates. But often, neither renewable option delivers. Then, grid operators must fall back on a technology they can control, which today usually means natural-gas power plants. So, instead of basing their electrical grid mostly on “firm” power sources including nuclear plants, these regions built three largely redundant power systems that struggle to work together. No wonder Californians pay some of the highest electricity prices in the country.

It all adds up to a good lesson in the folly of industrial policy. But where do we go now? No one is going to tear down all those wind turbines and solar panels. Utility-scale batteries are coming down in price and do help smooth out swings in solar output. Of course, that’s yet another infrastructure expense needed to make wind and solar work. A new report from NERC predicts grid reliability will be a bit better than expected this summer, partly due to the growth in such battery storage systems. Many promising nuclear projects are in the works. And geothermal power shows promise. But whatever direction our power grid takes, let’s hope it’s guided by engineering and economic reality—not politically motivated wishcasting.

And let’s drop that obsolete term “renewable.”

Mr. Meigs is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.