Consider it the “progressives’” latest move to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face:
Envirocrats are cheering the sobering news that another proposed Pennsylvania natural gas-fired power plant has been scuttled in Allegheny County.
That, the Post-Gazette reports, “after eight years of development, permitting and opposition.”
Invenergy pulled its own plug recently on its proposed Allegheny Energy Center in Elizabeth Township, citing “current market conditions.” It might as well have cited “mass idiocy.”
The P-G notes that “environmental groups that have fought the project from its zoning variance requests at the local level to its air permit applications with the Allegheny County Health Department celebrated their role in scuttling the plant, just as they did with the $1 billion proposed Renovo Energy Center in Clinton County that was canceled in April after eight years of permitting and development.”
The P-G also reports that such groups as PennFuture and the Clear Air Council “said strong community advocacy also ended the prospects of a natural gas plant that was proposed in Robinson Township. That initiative let its environmental permit expire in 2021 and never reapplied.”
Said Joseph Minott, executive director and chief counsel for the Clean Air Council:
“Allegheny Energy Center’s demise marks the end of giant new fossil-fueled power plants in Pennsylvania. Instead of locking us into decades of fossil fuel use and fueling the climate crisis, Pennsylvania can invest in wind and solar, which are safer, cheaper, and guarantee our energy independence far into the future.”
Where does one begin with the folly of Minot’s outrageous misrepresentations?
We’ll begin – and end — with a spot-on, general and quite timely assessment Thursday by the editorialists at Issues & Insights:
“We’ve been told with clockwork regularity that in order to prevent a baked planet, we have to generate our electricity through renewable sources, primarily wind and solar. Set aside for now the legitimate questions about the reliability and cost of both and consider this: Do we even have enough room for the equipment necessary to produce enough power to meet the demand?”
They remind that “both wind and solar power are voracious land hogs.”
“Wind or solar can need 90 to 100 times more acreage than a natural gas plant to generate the same amount of electricity. And let’s not forget the large swaths of land that will have to be appropriated, and in heavily forested areas clear cut, to build transmission lines that connect solar and wind farms to distribution lines.”
And all regularly and heavily subsidized by taxpayers to make it somehow “economically efficacious.”
All of this, of course, smells. But, just as obviously, the nose-less ecocrats long have been unable to catch even a passing whiff of their folly.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
