RIP IRA: The Inflation Reduction Act’s final anniversary

This weekend will be the third anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, signed on August 16, 2022. With many of its provisions targeted for termination by the current congress and president, the IRA won’t live to a fourth anniversary.

But it leaves behind two major legacies:

1. While congressional euphemisms have always been abusive to the English language (remember the “Affordable Care Act”?), the IRA explored new layers of punishment. A spending proposal that threatened to loot $1.5 trillion from American taxpayers if left it place, the IRA was the opposite of “inflation reduction.” The only honest word in the name was “Act.”
2. A lot of that loot was put into polluting our landscape with needless, weather-restricted wind turbines and solar panels.

Since passage of the IRA, the Capital Research Center has produced many reports covering the effectiveness and cost of weather-dependent power.

Low-Quality Energy for the LIDACs and $21.8 Billion in Waste from the EPA, a January 2025 report, recounted some of the most noxious IRA spending and who received it:

The gas stoves they’re hoping to take away from the poor are preferred by wealthy homeowners, chefs and foodies. And electric vehicles are so undesired by everyone that since 2022 Ford has reportedly lost a cumulative $10 billion on its EV program.

Divided equally among Ford’s 89,000 American employees, the $10 billion flushed away on EVs since 2022 could have been paid as bonus checks that exceeded $112,000. Instead, during the last quarter, Ford reported a $58,000 loss for each EV it sold.

Bloomberg Philanthropies Tracks “Petrochemical Incidents” but Not Wind and Solar Accidents examined a year in the life of solar and wind energy accidents.

The first item was this:

January 11. Colorado-Nebraska border: A wind turbine either caught fire and fell over or fell over and caught fire. According to the media report: “Readings from the Sidney Airport MesoWest station at the time indicated winds of 16 to 24 miles an hour and gusts up to 31 miles an hour, with a period of light freezing rain and ice fog that preceded light snow.”

“Our country is too big and too diverse to rely on one source of energy,” said a resident living next to the accident. “But I don’t know if this one has been thought out. You need to have a plan to take care of stuff like that.”

This was the first, but far from the last, example of weather causing big problems for weather-dependent energy.

The report also explained why the “renewables” drama isn’t worth the expense:

Wind and solar put together accounted for only 2.6 percent of total U.S. energy consumption in 2023.

Note that the total contribution of wind and solar energy is just a couple of percentage ticks more than the energy we generated from burning wood and trash. The supposed energy of the future contributed as much as the energy of the 18th century.

Remember when the environmental movement was about preserving … the environment?

“Renewable Energy . . . or Maybe Not” covered the enormous land use of wind turbines and concluded:

Although wind and solar energy systems are promoted as “renewable” power, they consume a disproportionate amount of what we cannot renew—the prettiest part of our environment.

And the biggest promoters don’t seem to notice the hypocrisy:

The richest American environmental nonprofits are strong promoters of weather-dependent energy. Nearly all of their webpages have images of wind turbines and solar panels.

The evidence they’re ignoring looks like this:

A 2021 analysis from Bloomberg News, titled “The U.S. Will Need a Lot of Land for a Zero-Carbon Economy,” came to this conclusion:

Wind farms, solar installations and other forms of clean power take up far more space on a per-watt basis than their fossil-fuel-burning brethren. A 200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 19 square miles (49 square kilometres). A natural gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block. [emphasis added]

Remember when the environmental movement was about preserving … the environment?

Supporters of Wind Farms over Nuclear Power Are Eagle Killers, Not Conservationists showed that another threat to the environment ignored by promoters of so-called “renewable” power has been the destruction of wildlife:

On April 6, energy firm NextEra pleaded guilty to three federal charges of killing eagles with wind turbines. The plea included an $8 million fine, an agreement to pay almost $30,000 for future eagle kills, and a commitment to spend $27 million to prevent future kills.

The penalties should have been worse. Prosecutors alleged NextEra’s raptor-slayers had executed 150 eagles in eight states.

NextEra didn’t act alone. Hundreds of hypocritical nonprofits implicitly endorse eagle elimination because they oppose nuclear energy and promote massive build-out of wind turbines. Their combined annual budgets exceed $1 billion.

The notorious list includes the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Financial support comes from big names such as the Ford Foundation.

Remember when the environmental movement was about saving those bald eagles, rather than slicing them apart?

Nobody has done more to report on the raptor murder than energy journalist Robert Bryce, who sat for a Capital Research Center podcast interview: InfluenceWatch Podcast #301: The Politics of the Power Grid.

Bryce and filmmaker Tyson Culver co-produced Juice: Power, Politics and the Grid, an excellent documentary series explaining … well, the title is self-explanatory. There is also a Capital Research Center review of all the episodes:

Film Review of Juice: Power Politics and the Grid (full series) 

1. 1. The Reliability Error
   2. The Commodity Error
   3. The Anti-Human League
   4. Victory?

Juice also reveals how bad energy policy infected red Republican states as well as blue Democratic-run states:

In the first episode, Juice showed video of left-leaning politicians and journalists who wagged their fingers and claimed ERCOT’s collapse should be blamed on misguided free-market fundamentalism. But Bryce also showed right-leaning critics who claimed ERCOT had crashed because addlebrained climate alarmists loaded it up with unreliable, weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels.

The truth is that it required the worst of both to wreck ERCOT and all the rest of the nation’s regional power grids. These supposed political rivals have been operating in collusion with each other for decades.

Here are some other CRC reports on the unreliable energy that the IRA was subsidizing:

Wind Turbines Produce Drama, Cash, and Some Electricity

General Electric’s Taxpayer-Powered Wind Machines

Italian Energy Giant Invades America

Wind Power Doesn’t Make Sense Without the Tax Credits

Climate Alarmists Hoover Up Corporate Welfare: The Rocky Mountain Institute

Al Gore’s 30 Years of Climate Errors: Glacial Recount

Anheuser-Busch InBev: Lame Leadership on Land Use

Invenergy: Billionaire Michael Polsky’s Wind Power Colossus

NextEra Energy: The King of Green Power

The Sequoia Climate Foundation: The “Secretive U.S. Vulture Fund”