Climate policy | The lie about cheap electricity

The John Amos coal-fired power plant near the town of Poca (US state of West Virginia) Photo: dpa/AP/John Raby The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promises citizens falling electricity prices. The reason is the repeal of central regulations to limit climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas power plants. The fact that the head of Donald Trump's authority, Lee Zeldin, announced this at a G20 ministerial meeting can only be interpreted as a deliberate provocation.

Of course, cheap electricity won't work. This doesn't just apply in the long term if you factor in the extremely high costs of increasing climate damage. It is completely unrealistic that large additional quantities can now be fed into the electricity grid in order to significantly increase supply as announced - the electricity system in the USA is not prepared for this, and this cannot be changed quickly. It's just a question of which systems are connected to the network. And wind and solar energy have long been the cheapest - if they are now forced out again by old coal plants, the financial result is foreseeable. We can only hope that the numerous states that are progressive when it comes to energy issues will continue to expand renewables, because the federal level is ultimately secondary in this regard.

The EPA decision also does not change the current main reason for rising electricity prices. What is driving this up is the extremely high demand due to the AI ​​infrastructure that is springing up like weeds in the global market leader USA. Data centers already consume around five percent of electricity. The fact that the big tech companies are grandly talking about their own decentralized energy solutions in their further expansion plans has not yet gone beyond announcements.

It is therefore foreseeable that prices will continue to rise in the United States. The promise of cheap electricity will turn out to be a lie. The second piece of bad news is that demand will likely be met again with coal-fired power plants in the future.

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