I received today an email from Dr. Bernd Fleischmann acknowledging my effort to present an english version of his recent presentation. In order to have a more accurate and complete communication he sent me the set of english slides in a pdf embedded below. Along with several additional exhibits, this makes a much more powerful and accessible statement of his points regarding the notion of a Climate Crisis. You can either scroll through the exhibits embedded on this page, or download the pdf file by hitting the download button at the bottom.
I thank Dr. Fleischmann for his research and organized critique of this issue and for speaking truth to the powers that be, many of whom are still entranced by a false narrative.
The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.
It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.
The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference. The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict.
That should have been the end of it. It was not.
Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.
The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear:
Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.
The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction
blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action
that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.
The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most, The court wrote,:
“ Comity expires when the strong public policies of the forum are vitiated by the foreign act.”
In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.
This is the right ruling. It is also a narrow one.
The injunction applies to one party in one state. Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace can still pursue the parts of its Dutch action that do not require erasing the North Dakota verdict.
Federal courts have not yet weighed in on whether American courts can block foreign collateral attacks on American judgments. And the federal circuits are split on how heavily international comity should weigh against such injunctions. Other state supreme courts have not taken up the question. The next activist group with a domestic loss and a foreign sympathetic forum will try the same play, just with better lawyers and a cleaner record.
And they have plenty of reasons to keep trying. The European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP directive was sold as a shield for journalists and dissidents in countries with weak speech protections. In practice, however, it is becoming a sword aimed at American energy companies that win in court. The directive’s “manifestly unfounded” standard invites foreign judges to second-guess the merits of American court verdicts. Article 17 invites damages claims for the offense of having sued. The architecture is custom-built for the exact tactic Greenpeace attempted.
The deeper problem is that the activist legal industry has discovered something useful. When the protests fail, when the defamation campaigns get punished, when the juries refuse to play along, there is always another forum, another court, another friendly jurisdiction willing to entertain the argument that American energy infrastructure is itself a kind of crime.
The point is not to win on the merits. The point is to make building anything in this country so legally treacherous that capital flees and projects die. This strategy will work in proportion to how seriously American courts take it.
The North Dakota Supreme Court took it seriously. Other courts must follow. Congress should pay attention too. American companies operating under American law, sued in American courts and vindicated by American juries should not have to fight the same case all over again in Amsterdam, Brussels, or anywhere else.
A federal statute clarifying the authority of American courts to block foreign collateral attacks on domestic judgments would put the matter beyond doubt. The Trump administration’s commitment to energy dominance demands nothing less.
The stakes are not abstract. Every data center humming with artificial intelligence, every factory bringing jobs back from overseas, every home heated through a North Dakota winter depends on the ability of American companies to build, operate, and defend the infrastructure that delivers reliable energy. Strip away the certainty that an American verdict actually means something, and that infrastructure becomes a much riskier bet. Risk premiums rise. Capital gets scarcer. Projects do not get built.
Greenpeace lost in North Dakota. It lost again on May 7. This is all good. But the rest of the country needs to make sure those losses stick and continue, because the next case is already being drafted somewhere, and the activists who brought us a six-year siege of the Dakota Access Pipeline are not going to take this defeat as a final answer. Neither should we.
Norway, an energy superpower, which gives it its massive sovereign wealth fund, is stepping up for itself and Europe. Sensible. Everybody wins. Meanwhile, the Left and the UK look like idiots.
In case of any doubt about Norway’s commitment to maintain – and expand – its production of gas and oil offshore, the energy minister,
“We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf.”
This week, to the alarm of environmental campaigners, he announced that three gasfields off the country’s southern coast would reopen by the end of 2028 – nearly three decades after they closed – to meet a shortfall caused by the impact of the war in Ukraineand disruption to supplies from the Middle East.
The decision will help keep gas and oil production at about the 2025 level – which has been stable for almost 20 years – and stay broadly the same for the rest of this decade. Norway has 97 offshore oilfields, three of which came on stream last year, and its Norwegian Offshore Directorate expects “100 and beyond” within the next two years, still producing at least the present level of 2m barrels of oil daily.
The Barents Sea, in the high north, is the new gas and oil frontier – with the prospect of mining for seabed minerals between northern Norway and Greenland, a more distant prospect after initial surveys by the Norwegian Offshore Directorate – an agency of Aasland’s department – showed potential.
“Norwegian offshore production plays an important role in ensuring energy security in Europe,” says Aasland.
“The world, and Europe, will have a need for oil and gas for decades to come and it is crucial that Norway continues to develop its continental shelf to remain a reliable and long-term supplier … and (with) a high level of exploration activity.”
The sector generates vast wealth for Norway, but the decision this week to reopen the Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk and Tommeliten Gamma gasfields in the North Sea, which were closed in 1998, has received heavy criticism in some quarters. It goes against the advice of the country’s environment agency, and the Socialist Left party accused the government of “greenwashing”.
Norway plans to revive three mothballed North Sea gas fields as demand in Europe soars. As the UK stalls on developing its side of the basin, with new licences banned and work on two fields frozen because of climate challenges, the Norwegian fields will be opened for the first time in 30 years.
They are believed to contain enough fuel to heat millions of homes and the country says it is vital for European energy security. The gas will be sent by pipeline to Germany with light oil sent to the UK.
The Norwegian government has also said that it is keen to further exploit its resources in the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea. It plans to access 70 blocks identified on the seabed. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said: “Norway’s oil and gas industry is vital to Norway and to Europe.” Energy minister Terje Aasland said: “Norwegian production of oil and gas is an important contribution to energy security in Europe.
“Developing new gas fields allows Norway to maintain high supply levels over the long term. This has become all the more crucial since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.”
The three fields are run by ConocoPhillips. The company’s European president, Steinar Våge, said: “By utilising existing infrastructure, we can produce substantial resources at low cost, and strengthen gas exports to Europe.”
The UK spent £20b buying oil and gas from Norway last year.
Meanwhile, its domestic output continues to fall.
Offshore operators have complained that it is becoming difficult to work under the current political regime. Drilling at both Rosebank, Britain’s largest untapped oil field, and Jackdaw, a gas field, has been halted after a legal challenge on climate grounds. The decision on whether work can restart rests with energy secretary, Ed Miliband.
The Norwegian fields were closed in 1998. However, thanks to new technology, they have become accessible. They are set to reopen in 2028 and are predicted to be in operation for 20 years. Energy experts suggested that the UK’s offshore industry was being held back by policy.
A spokesman for Offshore Energies UK told the Telegraph:
“The discrepancy in success in the two different regions of the North Sea is not dictated by geology. “It is entirely determined by how respective governments treat oil and gas resources through policy, regulation and taxation.”
Shadow energy minister Claire Coutinho said:
“Norway just announced 70 new blocks of oil and gas exploration, including in the North Sea. “Meanwhile, just over the border on the British side of the North Sea, our Energy Secretary tells us we’ve got nothing left so he has to ban new licences.
“Same basin. Same geology. The difference is political will.”
Apologies to anyone offended by an oilman’s vocabulary.
As the Trump Administration meets with oil and gas CEOs to discusslowering gas prices, there’s a growing question that can’t be ignored: Who is working just as aggressively to stop it?
Green groups have filed over 600 lawsuits targeting energy policies and projects. These efforts are not isolated; they form a coordinated strategy to challenge nearly every aspect of an energy agenda focused on increasing supply and lowering costs.
Organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club,
and Earthjustice openly tout their litigation records.
NRDC alone has reported suing the administration more than160 times, including efforts that helped halt major infrastructure projects like Keystone XL. The Sierra Club has claimed more than 300 cases during Trump’s first term and over 100 additional legal actions in 2025 alone. Earthjustice similarly boasts more than200 lawsuits.
This is not routine legal oversight; this is a full-scale attack to reshape U.S. energy policy through the courts.
Many of these organizations operate within a broader network of donors, including foreign billionaires like Hansjörg Wyss, whose funding has supported a range of environmental advocacy initiatives. That raises important transparency concerns: if overseas money is helping fuel legal campaigns that influence U.S. energy policy, the public deserves to know.
“The environmental movement has weaponized litigation to deliberately undermine and slow down American energy production at every turn,” said Daniel Turner, Founder and Executive Director of Power The Future. “These groups operate as a well-funded and aggressive adversary to U.S. energy independence, not as some innocent third party simply looking out for nature. While American families and workers suffer from higher energy costs and lost opportunities, these organizations file lawsuit after lawsuit to block responsible domestic development. It’s time to treat them as the serious obstacle they are and shine a light on who is really pulling the strings behind this coordinated campaign against our nation’s energy industry.”
Economist Wayne Winegarden describes the economic damages done by this litiigation in his Forbes article Fossil Fuel Lawsuits Are A Tax On Consumers. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Announcing the state’s lawsuit against energy producers, California AG Rob Bonta claimed it is time to make energy companies pay for “the harm they have caused.” It is one of more than thirty such lawsuits around the country.
As I have argued here, here, and here, these lawsuits are not heroic efforts to safeguard the environment. The filings by cities and state AGs, as well as the dozens of other suits they hope to inspire, will primarily harm families by worsening the affordability crisis that is already harming households across the country. As with any policy that drives up the costs of energy, low- and middle-income families will bear the brunt of the costs.
Of course, harming families and local businesses through higher energy costs is not how the plaintiffs justify their lawsuits. California and other elected officials around the country sell their lawsuits to their local constituents with populist tropes about corporate accountability.
Yet, based on the comments of many of the AGs and plaintiff attorneys, the litigants recognize that one impact from the lawsuits will be higher costs on consumers. For many plaintiffs, imposing larger costs on families and businesses is an intended outcome.
Take comments California’s attorney general made in late April to an environmental group about this litigation. Responding to a questions from the host, he said
“One goal for the litigation is to make oil and gas more expensive as a way to disincentive use of these energy sources and impose billions of dollars in costs that these companies will have to share with their shareholders.”
Higher energy costs harm families’ financial stability. As the Federal Reserve notes, “when gasoline prices increase, a larger share of households’ budgets is likely to be spent on it, which leaves less to spend on other goods and services. The same goes for businesses whose goods must be shipped from place to place or that use fuel as a major input (such as the airline industry). Higher oil prices tend to make production more expensive for businesses, just as they make it more expensive for households to do the things they normally do.”
If the plaintiffs are able to extract a $200 billion settlement from the energy companies, which is much less than what they are asking for, then the price of gasoline would increase by 62-cents a gallon based on my previous analysis relating higher oil prices to higher gasoline costs. That is a more than 17 percent increase in the average price of a gallon of gas as of May 13, 2024.
Further, due to energy’s ubiquitous use, prices would also increase for a wide range of goods such from cell phones to groceries, as well as services, particularly heating and cooling our homes. These higher costs will diminish national economic growth and reduce economic opportunities.
Making matters worse, climate litigation deters companies and investors from allocating their capital toward developing potential clean energy innovations. The deterrent is even larger because technologies that were once heralded as important sources of low-emission energy now face the same serious litigation exposure.
For instance, increasing use of natural gas is an important reason why carbon emissions have been declining over the past twenty years. However, natural gas producers are still targeted in these lawsuits. Given the pollution associated with all energy sources – including solar and wind – the lawsuits send an anti-innovation signal to all potential energy entrepreneurs.
Then there is the lawsuits’ hypocrisy. For example, the California attorney general claims he wants to punish fossil fuel companies because the companies allegedly knew that global climate change was a risk but intentionally hid these risks from the public.But California, the U.S. Government, and governments around the world were also well aware of these risks.
Suing fossil fuel producers for the costs of climate change is economically
damaging, environmentally suspect, and based on dubious claims.
It will also harm families, particularly working families, at a time when they are already struggling with the high cost of living. Ultimately, there are many serious adverse consequences from state and local litigation against traditional energy companies, but no economic upsides should the plaintiffs prevail.
Climate Activists storm the bastion of Exxon Mobil, here seen without their shareholder disguises.
BREAKING: U.S. Unleashes $10 Billion Nuclear Shockwave To Revive Belgium’s Energy!
Mackenzie Web reports on an announcement in Belgian news site La Libre “The United States wants to help Belgium restart its nuclear power plants, Donald Trump is fully behind the project” (translation) Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
In a bold revelation, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White announced a game-changing investment plan that shifts the energy landscape of Europe. America is prepared to finance up to 50 percent of new nuclear reactor construction in Belgium, potentially injecting $10 billion into this initiative. His remarks, delivered to the Belgian newspaper La Libre, signal a renewed focus on nuclear energy as a reliable power source. White, clearly aligned with Trump’s energy strategy, stated,
“Washington is all-in on helping Belgium reverse decades of suicidal green phase-out madness.”
Several MEPs (mainly Greens) hold up anti-nuclear posters at EU debate.
This renewed commitment comes at a pivotal time for Belgium as it seeks to reclaim its energy independence. The country’s new right-leaning government, led by Prime Minister Bart De Wever, is actively nationalizing its nuclear fleet and abandoning plans to decommission existing reactors. No longer willing to rely on inconsistent renewable energy sources, Belgium is stepping back into its nuclear past, which had been shunned during years of leftist climate policies prioritizing wind and solar over proven energy sources. As White puts it, the reality of energy security is finally sinking in.
American companies Westinghouse and GE Vernova are set to lead the charge in this nuclear renaissance. Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor, equipped with advanced passive safety features, promises a safer, more efficient alternative to outdated technologies previously favored in Europe. With an impressive capability for 72 hours of blackout protection, this reactor is already in operation in the U.S. and China, demonstrating its reliability. Similarly, GE Vernova’s BWRX-300 small modular reactor boasts rapid deployment capabilities, making it a perfect fit for Belgium’s urgent energy needs.
BWRX-300 Small Modular Reactor | GE Vernova Hitachi
The significance of this investment stretches beyond economics; it also reinforces America’s longstanding alliance with Belgium. White highlighted that this initiative harkens back to an 80-year partnership where the Belgian Congo’s uranium was pivotal in America’s atomic endeavors during World War II. The contribution of Belgian resources in winning past conflicts illustrates the strategic bonds between the two nations, and today’s nuclear cooperation continues that legacy. As White emphasizes, this is not merely a financial deal—it is a calculated move toward mutual security, ensuring that European nations can break away from fluctuating foreign energy supplies.
Moreover, this initiative marks a decisive pivot from recent energy decisions that left European nations vulnerable. The reliance on Russian and Middle Eastern sources has proven costly and unstable, especially amid geopolitical tensions. White asserts that under this new agreement, Belgium can expect “no more blackouts” and “no more skyrocketing bills,” fundamentally changing the energy conversation in Europe. With the U.S. stepping up to fill this critical void, the interests of American energy innovation directly align with the needs of a nation seeking stability.
In summation, this announcement is a shot across the bow to proponents of renewable energy who have long championed policies ignoring the realities of energy demand and practicality. The message is clear: America is not just offering financial assistance; it is providing a framework for a robust nuclear future. While globalists may resist this trend, the power of American engineering and technology is poised to reshape Belgium’s energy landscape, ensuring real leadership is showcased on the world stage. The green dream is receding, while the nuclear renaissance emerges, casting doubt on the feasibility of relying solely on renewables.
Frank Clemente and Fred Palmer remind us how essential is coal power with their Real Clear Energy article What Coal Did Today. Text is below with my bolds and added images.
Coal has been the material foundation of industrialization, urbanization, modernization and technological development for more than two centuries. The examples are endless. It was coal that propelled the Industrial Revolution in England that spread throughout the world. It was coal that provided the electrification of virtually every society.
Progress of civilization through changing mixes of energy sources.
Coal was the foundational fuel for the electrification of the Tennessee Valley Authority and brought myriad associated benefits to the cities, towns and farms across the entire American landscape. It was coal that powered the Transcontinental Railroad and the steamships that traversed every ocean. Coal produced the steel that enabled the skyscrapers, bridges, hospitals, highways, dams. irrigation systems and power plants. Steel remains the backbone of practically every home, factory, school and hospital.
And it was coal that provided the means to lift millions upon millions out of poverty and extended human existence to enjoy a higher quality of life. It is no coincidence that the U.S. increase in life expectancy from 48 in 1900 to 77 in 2000 was highly correlated with the rise of coal-based electricity. No wonder that the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) identified “electrification” as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.
But coal is far more than history. It is a current global reality,
improving the daily lives of billions of people throughout the world.
Consider the continuing role coal plays in the largest urbanizing society in the world—comprising 1.5 Billion people—nearly 20%% of the global population:
India: coal generates 75% of electricity, produces over 80% of steel and the vast majority of cement. India’s urban population is projected to grow by an incredible 400 million people by 2050, resulting in over 900 million living in cities, The World Bank has warned that 50% of the necessary urban infrastructure for 2050 has not yet built. Coal is the sine qua non of that growth.
As a result, India’s installed crude steel capacity of about 180 million metric tons in fiscal year 2025 is set to grow, reaching up to 280 million metric tons by 2035 alone.
And the beat goes on, By 2050, 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas, adding approximately 2.5 billion people to cities, some 80 million a year, 220,000 each day, 9,000 per hour and 190 new urbanites every single minute 24/7 for 24 years.
The above video includes a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg and Scott Bessent at the annual IIF gathering (Institute of International Finance). The introduction by IIF CEO Tim Adams starts about 11 minutes in. For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript of comments back and forth, along with some added images. TA refers to Adams, BL to Lomborg and SB to Bessent.
TA: Today we’re going to deepen the discussion with a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg who runs the Copenhagen Consensus and the author how to spend 75 billion to make the world a better place. I’ve had this book on my desk since it was published in 2014. It’s a great publication. If you haven’t read it, you should. I’m sure Bjorn will give you some copies. It really is how do we do development and a cost benefit assessment? How do we get the most bang for our buck? And that conversation is often missed in this town and other capitals. And of course, we’re delighted and honored to have the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent back today to join us at our spring meetings. So, ladies and gentlemen, please invite to the stage Bjorn and Secretary Scott Bessent.
BJ: Thank you very much. Tim, you kind of took away all our talking points. So, Mr. Secretary, it’s great to have a conversation here today about the World Bank and the IMF here at their spring meeting. The goals of these institutions, of course, is to accelerate global development, drive economic growth, and lift billions of people out of poverty. And these goals remain vitally important. Unfortunately, many development institutions now prioritize Western elite issues like gender, social topics, and climate change over what the world’s poorest people need and want: better education, healthcare, and reliable energy.
Nowhere is this disconnect more clear than in their climate fixation. In the latest year, 48% of the World Bank’s financing went to so-called climate finance, up from 44% the year before, exceeding their own uh 45% target. I suspect the reason why elites are so climate focused is because they correctly see the poor as more vulnerable to climate impacts. But remember, poor people are more vulnerable to every impact. They’re more vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to bad education, to corruption.
The World Bank and the IMF need to get back to making rational priorities. For instance, using cost benefit analysis. As Tim also just mentioned, these organizations used to lead the world in cost benefit analysis. As I’ve argued for a long time, and the reason I think we’re having this conversation now is that we need to scrap these climate targets and get the World Bank and IMF back to their core missions.
In your speech here last year at the IIF, you made this exact point and you called on the World Bank and the IMF to refocus on their core missions. In your view, how has the bank and the fund responded and what more do they need to do?
SB: Well, Bjorn, thank you and good good to be back here a year later to talk a little about a report card for the multilateral banks and to also say that the US leads the G20 this year and I can tell you that our agenda is growth. We believe in the US that the biggest risk to financial stability is a lack of growth.
When I look at the choices that Europe has made unable to follow the Draghy report from Mario Draghy on how to increase growth. The the EU was originally the European Economic Union and it was meant to facilitate trade among the members, make it more seamless, create more prosperity. And it turns out that it’s probably been a hint of the IMF and World Bank. I’m informed by Grace Hopper who was the first female Admiral in the US who was a big fan of it. She has some great sayings. Two of them, one is: The most dangerous words in the English language are “because we’ve always done it that way”. And the second is: “The way to get things done is to get things done.”
And I think we need to step back and look at the IMF and World Bank, their core missions. The IMF I believe the is global financial stability and stabilizing the countries that are in bad equilibriums and getting them back to a sustainable path an economically sustainable path. World Bank is to pull people out of poverty and we cannot have these kinds of elite beliefs get in the way. And I think a lot about this Nature magazine article that came out in April of 2024 that became the guiding principle for so much of the climate beliefs: that GDP was going to be 60% % lower by the turn of the century. So then it was the gospel for 18 months and then it was refuted.
So every everything was based on that. So you know I I don’t think that we can have this kind of short- termism. I think we have to stick with core principles and I do think we we are starting to see at at the World Bank. They are starting to take a tack more for energy abundance and all of the above. They have now gotten on board with nuclear energy. I’m not sure why it ever went away.
And then the IMF, I think, needs to lead by example, probably get rid of their golf course out in Maryland, which I said last year, and focus on global imbalances. Because I can tell you this slow motion buildup of global imbalances after a lack of sustainable growth, it is the the the biggest risk.
The the world cannot take a China with a trillion dollar trade surplus.
BL: And I think you’re absolutely right and one of those points that we we believe somehow that climate is so important that we need to do everything because the nature study that you mentioned that suggests that we could lose 60% of global GDP if we didn’t fix climate change. Which later turned out to be wrong, but of course the point is if that was really true, it should have been rich countries spending rich country money on dealing with climate change. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s mostly rich countries deciding to spend poor people’s money through the World Bank and the IMF badly. And this is not what the the world’s poor are telling us that they want.
So I I had the fortune to work together with Nobel laurate Tom Shelling and he often asked the very simple question, how do you best help poor people? Through development policy or through climate policy? Remember climate policy costs hundreds of trillions of dollars and it shaves off a tiny fraction of a degree in a century’s time. Development policy like avoiding death costs just billions or maybe even just millions of dollars and saves lives right now. And of course that is why development policy often is much much better if you actually want to help poor people.
And of course it also builds much more resilience. Look, a hurricane that hits poor Haiti kills hundreds of people. The same hurricane hitting rich Florida kills virtually no one because prosperity protects people. And so we need to get this conversation back and I think this is exactly where the IMF and the World Bank need to get back to their core missions.
SB: I think it has to be resiliency supply chains. Again, I think you know both the IMF and the World Bank have an important role in understanding this debt loop and downward spiral that many countries are in. Several countries, one in particular, have done the equivalent of a loan to own program. With a lot of these countries there’s a lot of undisclosed debt. There are a lot of tolling arrangements that are unfortunate and I think only the these multilateral banks can effectuate that.
But you know again I do want to congratulate them. The IMF was willing to say this time is different with Argentina and Argentina’s been a fantastic success. They’re accumulating reserves every day as we speak. Tens of millions of people there are being brought out of poverty. The government of Javier Milei, I’m very interested to see it was the poorest elements of Argentine society who voted for him this time around and the young people. So there there’s optimism there. And then you know that the IMF is working on bringing Venezuela back into making it look more like a normal economy, and I think will play a very important role there. And I think the World Bank leadership is back on a good trajectory in terms of energy and unlocking resources for the the very poorest countries.
BL: Yeah. If you don’t mind, I’ll pick you up on that energy point because last October you withdrew the United States from the Green Climate Fund. Because in your words, their goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction. I think that shows the general point we often forget, how energy really powers modern life. It warms us in the winter, it cools us in the summer, it transports us. I mean, look around this room and I think pretty much everyone is from somewhere else. And this is what energy does. Energy allows us to live better than kings of the past.
Energy really is prosperity. Yet, the climate fixation that we’ve been talking about means that both the World Bank and the IMF pushed for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and for total ban fossil fuel investment. And I think they need a reality check. There is no transition that taking place globally. We use more renewables, yes, but we also use much more fossil fuels. The world still gets more than 80% of its total energy from fossil fuels. And the decline is so slow that on current trends, we will only get to 0% in 4 to 10 centuries.
Germany has spent famously 700 billion euros on its energy shift since 2002. Electricity prices more than doubled and yet Germany’s energy is still 79% fossil fuels. China produces most of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars, but much of this of is produced with coal. China’s energy is still 87% fossil fuel. I would say a Chinese EV is a coal powered vehicle. Much of it is in China and of course especially in some places, for instance India, which are driven enormously on coal, they simply they emit more. But the real point is that poor countries want to get rich like China did. They want to use more energy and much of this will be fossil fuels. They don’t want to copy Germany and they don’t have 700 billion euros to blow on climate policies. So it is just simply hypocritical forcing poor nations into renewables that even rich Germany or China aren’t achieving.
In your IIF speech last year, you call on the World Bank to focus its efforts on expanding developing country access to reliable and affordable energy and you criticized its climate targets. You noted that the IMF devotes disproportionate time and resources on climate even though it’s not part of the fund’s mission. So, what have you seen from the bank and the fund in these areas since your speech? And what more do you expect from them?
SB: Again, as as I said earlier, I think the World Bank is has made a good pivot. They they are now pushing or they are a proponent of nuclear energy. I’m not sure how that wasn’t considered a renewable for for so many years. I mean, if if you look now, France is powering the European energy grid and their their reactors are running the full blast and it’s one of the cleanest. But when you think the Europeans got into this terrible recursive loop because they they decided to turn turn off their nuclear energy. The Germans became more dependent on Russian crude and then the Russians were selling them the crude to finance the war against them.
But you know I do think the World Bank is moving to an all of the above energy process and program and again is getting back to the core mission of lifting people out of poverty. And you know I would just say it’s very good to follow not only what people say but what they do. Bill Gates, who for a long time had pushed this climate agenda, has also changed tack. If you read his recent speeches he believes we’re going to innovate our way out of this. And the Gates Foundation has something like 13 billion of investment in energy innovation. Look no one’s expecting deos machina, one day and everything will be fixed. But in in the US we were going to run out of everything, going to run out of the crude and crude derivatives. And then fracking was invented and now that the the US larger reserves than Saudi and Venezuela.
On the other side, I think the IMF getting back to this message of stability, of monitoring global imbalances and stepping in early. You know I didn’t always agree with Ben Bernanke’s monetary policy, but I always admired Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke because he had a framework. And if you ask him a question, you could almost see him run it through his framework and everything was always consistent. And I think with the IMF and the World Bank the framework needs to always be consistent.
BL: On the Bill Gates point I think really two things stand out. First of all, the innovation point that you just made. I mean this is what has always solved the problem. Tim mentioned the green revolution that we had in the 1970s when we worried about running out of food. Remember, we didn’t fix the problem of the world not having enough food by telling everyone, “I’m sorry. Do you mind not eating as much?” And then we’ll send it down to whoever it is that we worry about. The point was that we innovated a way to generate much more food.
And of course, we’ll do the same thing with climate. We are going to solve big problems through innovation. That’s how we’ve always done it. But I think Bill Gates made another point which is incredibly powerful and useful when you talk about climate change. He said: “For so long we’ve been talking about climate as if the point is to cut carbon emissions or to reach a certain temperature limit. No, the point is to make the world better for humans. And there the question is do we make the world better for humans by cutting carbon emissions by whatever tons? Or do we make it better by for instance making it so small children don’t die or that in school there’s so many other ways we can also do this or that. This of course refers back on the IMF and especially the World Bank on what can be done and there are just so many incredible things that we can do first.
SB: Yeah, again, you know, I think keeping focus on the main thing and not getting distracted by what feels good, it’s convenient, it’s part of the the Davos consensus while much of the Davos consensus seems to have been shattered.
WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey
BL: Yes. So I want to just take us to our third and and and last point and talk about tradeoffs. Because all international financial institutions need to get back to the core point of tradeoffs. Look,the money that the World Bank spent on a solar panels can’t be invested in healthcare or education. And the world’s poor tell us very clearly not to focus on climate first. When Africans are asked what worries them the most, climate change came almost at the bottom. A vast survey of more than 50,000 Africans across 39 countries found that climate change ranked 31 of 34. The top concerns are not surprising there. It’s unemployment, the economy, health, education, poverty, roads, electricity, hunger, and corruption. And then it goes on for a long time until you get to 31, which is climate change.
When your child might die tonight from a preventable disease, no family cares about shaving a fraction of a degree off global temperatures in a century from now. Elected leaders of poor countries tell us the same thing. In a large survey of low and low middle- income countries, they show climate ranks 12 of 16 issues. Even the World Bank’s own client surveys show climate ranks low. So international financial institutions should compact to focus on their strengths. As you’ve said, the World Bank should focus on poverty reduction and the IMF on macroeconomic stability, but the world’s poor are very clearly saying don’t focus on climate first.
So from your perspective as treasury secretary, how do you view the international financial institutions and their effectiveness in general and the bank and the fund specifically?
SB: You know I would also highlight that it’s not a unique survey item among the world’s poorest. Germany instituted very very strict remodeling and rebuild requirements for German households. So you had to spend I can’t remember it was 30 40 50,000 euros to upgrade to a a more green house and they’re all getting voted out. So like probation is not a good motivator. I do think,as I said last year, that we are determined with the multilateral financial institutions the US wants to be in it to win it. We want to be good partners. America first does not mean America alone. And we we want to go back to basics.
These banks were invented around Breton Woods which was post World War II Europe and Asia, and was a unique time in America and it led to incredible prosperity the across the world. So, you know, why can’t we do that again? And why can’t we focus on growth? Like what are the tools? What what what is hindering growth of these economies? Is it the unsustainable debt which is is the IMF concern?
Is it the poor infrastructure, health and hygiene, which is the World Bank role?
Because you know for a time we kind of skipped the foundational elements and tried to jump to something else, kind of luxury beliefs, instead of issues when a government was not able to fund itself or if people were not able to feed themselves. We’ve just got to get back to that. I I think Ajay and Kristalina have have gotten the message and are moving forward in a very very constructive way and I want to congratulate them.
BL: When you have to decide what to do obviously I’m I’m an advocate for cost benefit analysis so I’m going to be saying they should be looking at it. Really, if you think about it, the World Bank and IMF used to be world leaders in cost benefit analysis. And it makes sense if you only have limited money. If you have to think about trade-offs all the time, you have to ask yourself where can we spend scarce resources and do the most good in the world. And this is exactly what cost benefit analysis does for you. It allows you to pick out the really good policies and make it just much more likely that we can actually achieve all these goals that we’re talking about.
About Heather Exner-Pirot My research focuses on Indigenous and northern economic development, energy security, and resource politics and policy. I am currently the Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Special Advisor to the Business Council of Canada, and a Research Advisor to the Indigenous Resource Network.
in the brief interview below she explains how Canada has squandered abundance, and is now facing an impending energy crisis. Her recent paper shown above (and linked later below) includes the background research for viewpoints expressed, and presented in the transcript with added bolds and images. JS refers to Jim Csek and HEP to Exner-Pirot.
Does Canada produce enough energy to sustain itself?
JS: British Columbia is now a net importer of electricity. You would think that would be almost impossible. And I remember a couple of years ago when Fortis applied in the Okanagan here to get a peaker plant, an LNG peaker plant, and they were denied and they seem to be going all in on at the time, all in on wind and solar. Now they’re kind of changing their focus to LNG.
The decisions that have been made over the past 10 years in Canada have put us in this place of energy dependence. Do you see light at the end of the tunnel? Do you see that we’re shifting? It’s been a year now with this new BC government, and they said they’re going to build at a speed like never seen before. Yet the NDP seems to be still stuck in its old ways. And we haven’t seen that speed yet.
HEP: No, we haven’t seen that speed. And maybe you saw I wrote a paper on electricity and our impending crisis that just came out last month. So when you say, you know, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, is it is it the light because we’re near death or is there actually some more electricity coming on board? And the one thing I think people don’t appreciate is that Canada’s electricity generation peaked in 2017. And I think everyone knows that we’ve added, I don’t know, six million people since then.
So on a per capita basis, our electricity generation is absolutely in decline. And this is happening as we’re pushing electrification of transportation, electrification of heating. And now we want to electrify everything that takes energy. We want to build more critical minerals production, do more smelting here. That takes electricity. We do not have the electricity to do all the things that we say we’re going to do.
And actually, this week, probably on Wednesday, the prime minister is going to announce a national electricity strategy. We’ll see how serious they are. If it’s all incentives for wind and solar and, you know, intertides from Nova Scotia to Quebec, I will say they’re not very serious. If there’s a lot of funding for nuclear and some carve-outs of the clean electricity regulations, I’ll say that they’re thinking about being serious.
But we’ve had such abundance in this country. In Canada, it always comes down to this, that we had time to squander it. We had way too much time to squander it. And we spent eight or 10 years squandering it. And just now we’re starting to worry. I always say, we’re like the frogs in the boiling water. We’re starting to notice it’s hot. But it’s been getting hot for many years.
And so now the question is, there’s real trade offs, Jim, as you know, in British Columbia, that for three years, actually, you’ve been a net importer of electricity. And now we want to build LNG Canada phase two and Ksi Lisims LNG. And you’re also doing wood fiber and you’re also doing cedar. And there’s also three mines that have been permanent or have expansions. And there’s not enough electricity for all of those things, not to mention all the people. And so it’s crazy that in a place like Kelowna the B.C. regulator is saying no more natural gas for home heating, you know, because we’ll miss our climate targets if we do that.
Meaning that people are being pushed with that scarce electricity for their home heating, whereas Kelowna is a beautiful place, but sometimes it does get to minus 25 occasionally. And that’s the exact time where you need to have enough electricity. And that tends to also be when, you know, when when hydro isn’t performing at its peak. And so we focus so much on sustainability and our electricity system these past 10 years that we really did it at the expense of reliability and affordability. And now it’s backtracking to try to balance those.
But I’ve been saying the next trade off is actually going to be between affordability and reliability. You’ll wish we could choose between sustainability and the other two. The choice you’re going to have to make is between affordability and reliability. And that’s not going to be a pleasant place for Canadians to be.
JS: Do you feel like sometimes you’re in a Monty Python skit when they talk about Canada needs to have an all EV mandate? And you know that there’s not enough electricity to do this. And it’s more of a pipe dream than a pipeline. Like, how do we how do we how do you square those two things? You got to drive EVs, yet there’s not enough electricity even for the stuff we have right now.
HEP: And it’s worse than that, Jim. You know, the the subsidies that went into heat pumps in Atlantic Canada, and Atlantic Canada is a big swing jurisdiction. You know, if the liberals can get can sweep Atlantic Canada, OK, they can get a majority. So that’s a very important jurisdiction for them. And they were on heating oil and heating oil is expensive. And heating oil does suck. They don’t have access to natural gas for some reasons of their own making. And so you do want to get off heating oil.
But they push on all these heat pumps and did nothing on the electricity generation side, and you can’t do one part of the equation. If you’re going to change a quarter of households to heat pumps, then you better think about how much electricity you’re going to need for that. Such that now we’ve had emergency applications from the Prince Edward Island utility and from New Brunswick saying we need a new natural gas generation immediately.
We need to be approved right away. This is an emergency. We already saw the cold snap that we had this year. They had to curtail some industrial use. I mean the utilities performed admirably under very difficult circumstances. But the actual situation in that cold snap was that we were not sending very much to the United States. We were importing from New England electricity produced from heating oil, and curtailing generation. And that can be very dangerous when when most of your households are on heat pumps and you have rotating brownouts. That is a very dangerous situation, actually.
Title is link to publication. Some important excerpts below in italics wtih my bolds.
The electricity abundance and affordability that Canada has enjoyed for decades are ending. Generation is down, exports are now imports, and investment is flat. This comes as electricity is increasingly scarce and its availability a competitive advantage. Canada’s impending electricity shortage is not just an affordability crisis; it is an economic and security one as well.
While electricity policy was largely driven by emissions reductions objectives for the past two decades, adequacy, reliability, and affordability are resurging as priorities. Governments that fail to address the issue will be punished at the ballot box: voters are ratepayers.
This paper has sought to outline the growing crisis in Canadian electricity production, describe the policy trajectory that contributed to this state of affairs, identify shifts in policy direction that Canadians should advocate, and understand how to gauge policy improvement, or lack thereof.
Canada’s electricity surplus diminished because we became complacent and took the resource for granted. The sector now demands our attention, and for the sake of all Canadians, we had better respond intelligently.
Although demand for electricity is growing, the forecasted growth in generation over the next five years is weak and will be accounted for wholly by intermittent renewables, the majority of which will come from wind. While renewables have their place in the energy mix, their power generation fluctuates based on weather and time of day, rather than conforming to electricity demand. This fundamental mismatch creates reliability, stability, and economic challenges for power grids, which are designed for constant, controllable base-load generation (see Sepulveda 2024). In fact, Canada’s Energy Regulator (CER 2025b) is forecasting that dispatchable capacity (i.e., sources of electricity that can adjust according to demand) will decline in Canada by 1.2 per cent by 2030.
In 2016, Canada sent as much as 64 TWh in net electricity exports annually to the US. However, that number has steadily dwindled due to a combination of drought and the growth in domestic demand. Canada became a net importer of electricity for the first time in modern history in Spring 2024. By the end of 2025, Canada had become a regular net importer of electricity (see Figure 5). In 2025 both BC Hydro and Hydro-Québec were net importers – a previously unthinkable outcome.
Introduced by Environment and Climate Change Canada in 2023 and finalized in December 2024, the CER (Clean Energy Regulations) set federal performance standards to achieve a near-zero emissions electricity grid by 2050 (a change from the initial 2035). The regulations set limits on carbon dioxide emissions from almost all electricity generation units that use fossil fuels beginning in 2035, phase out coal-fired generation, and impose strict limits on emissions from natural gas sources. The CER provides compliance options such as emission reductions at source, carbon credit purchases, and direct investment in clean generation projects. While the CER gives incentives for creating infrastructure for renewables and storage, it also introduces higher capital costs, regulatory complexity, and market uncertainty. With large hydro and nuclear projects becoming too expensive for governments and investors to afford, too longterm, or simply unavailable for many jurisdictions, the CER removed the last best source of firm (i.e. always available) power additions available to many jurisdictions: new natural gas-fired generating units.
Canada’s electricity crunch comes just when a surplus could have been directed to productive capacities. An LNG construction boom, increased oil and gas extraction, significant new mines and expansions in BC, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Yukon, Quebec, and Nunavut, and the implementation of a defence industrial strategy all require significant new generation and transmission. Canada will not reach its goals to double non-US exports without more and affordable electricity.
But the biggest opportunity is in data centres, and the cost of missing out is not only an economic risk, but a security one as well. Electricity is now being selectively rationed in Canada, with data centres facing enhanced scrutiny. This is a problem because data centres are not only at the forefront of global capital investment, but they are also increasingly integral to national security. They are critical infrastructure, essential for the smooth functioning and productivity of an advanced economy, but they are also drivers of economic and military competitiveness. Reliance on foreign infrastructure to train models, store sensitive datasets, or deploy AI systems makes countries vulnerable in much the same way that relying on competitors or adversaries for oil, natural gas, or critical minerals does.
The fact is that Canada’s principal goal guiding electricity policy for the past two decades has been to reduce emissions. Ensuring reliable and affordable electricity has taken a back seat. When those policies were implemented, there was enough abundance in the system that the normal concerns of regulators and producers could fall into the background. That is no longer the case.
The Carney government, which includes senior advisors and Cabinet members with direct experience in the electricity sector, seems better equipped and motivated to tackle the issue than the previous Liberal government, and at the time of writing had announced the imminent release of a National Electricity Strategy. The extent to which it addresses the nuts and bolts of our current dilemma – that the country must find a way to create the conditions to generate, transmit, and distribute more MW at a lower cost,versus investing public dollars in expensive and politically motivated vanity projects with no business case – will determine if, and how fast, we in Canada can extract ourselves from our electricity deficit.
A part of Battle of Ideas Festival 2025 was the above presentation explaining plainly why UK energy has become so expensive. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript with my added bolds and images.
Why are our electricity bills so high? We’re told as Craig referenced that it’s all the fault of gas. Now this argument is going to come to somewhat crashing reality in the next year. I was just checking the prices now and from yesterday’s close we’re now87 percent down from the highs in 2022. Now has anybody seen an 87 percent reduction in their bills, hands up, anybody? Oh that’s a huge shock. Next year gas analysts expect that the gas price will return to its long-term average pre-2021.
So the gas crisis actually began in the autumn of 2021, about six months before the invasion of Ukraine and it was to do with the recovery from COVID. Basically during COVID demand for gas fell because industrial activity dropped, a lot of upstream production was shut in and it takes time to bring that back, you can’t just turn on the tap in most cases, it requires quite a bit more work than that. So there was a delay in bringing that production back online and when you have more demand than you’ve got supply then prices go up and then Putin took advantage of this in the following February and well we all know what happened then.
Since then in the upstream sector they’ve been busy bringing new LNG, liquefied natural gas projects, on stream. By the end of this year there’ll be enough new LNG to fully replace all of Russian gas and sometime next year we’re expecting the global gas market to go back into length. So there’ll be more supply globally than there is demand and prices are expected to fall. In fact the only reason why Miliband could possibly deliver the 300 pound reduction in bills would be because of gas prices falling.
Unfortunately I think he’s going to more than offset that with higher subsidy costs. So the first thing is that gas is not expensive and really for 25 years we had very low and very stable gas prices. Gas was cheap, in fact the cheapness of gas was what enabled the energy transition to even begin. I wrote a report earlier in the year about the cost of renewables, if you do a chart that shows the wholesale price of gas, the wholesale price of electricity and then the domestic price of electricity what you find is that the wholesale gas price was low and stable until 2021.
The wholesale electricity price was basically the wholesale gas price plus a little bit which is what you’d expect and then the domestic price was the wholesale price of electricity plus a little bit. And again you’d expect that you buy a wholesale, you pay for it to be delivered to your house, you’ve got to pay the supplier some money for you know doing the admin for that, they want to take a bit of profit, there’s some taxes, that’s what you’d expect.
Figure 4 – International Domestic Electricity Prices (p per kWh). UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA.
But from 2006 this relationship started to break down and what we saw was a steep increase in what households were paying despite a flat trajectory for wholesale prices. Why was this? It was because we were adding on policy costs. We’re subsidizing renewables, we started using suppliers to do all sorts of other social programs, wealth redistribution, literally the warm homes discount is suppliers. They phone up the department for work and pensions and they find out which of their customers are eligible and then they calculate how much that discount is going to cost and then they add on an admin fee and then they spread that cost out across all our other customers.
They take money from one group of customers to give to another. This is wealth redistribution, it’s not the job of private companies. The energy company obligation, we’ve heard about that in the news this week where I think the National Audit Office has written a report saying how inefficient it is, how low quality the work is. Well guess what, energy companies are not experts in construction. They are being expected to engage in sub contracts to companies that will come in and install insulation and similar things in your home. They don’t know anything about this, this isn’t part of their core business.
Typically as wind and solar power share of supply increases, distribution and transmission costs rise sharply.
It’s a hugely inefficient thing to expect suppliers to do and the cost of all that is added to bills. The smart meter rollout, we’re the only country in the world that expects suppliers, retailers, to install network equipment in people’s homes. Everyone else got the network companies to do it, you know, duh. And what’s even worse is that the supply business was created within the Utility Act 2000. It was the final part of unbundling the energy system and almost immediately both the governments and the regulators started telling everyone that suppliers were greedy profiteers that couldn’t be trusted.
And then they expressed shock that nobody wants these greedy profiteers who can’t be trusted to install devices in their home that would give the greedy suppliers that can’t be trusted lots of information about how they’re using electricity and gas and potentially enable them to change your prices remotely, put you onto prepayment tariffs remotely and do all sorts of other stuff remotely, potentially without your permission. And they were just kind of shocked that people didn’t want to do that. So the whole market is completely dysfunctional.
Now, when we come to the real costs and the real reasons that our bills are so high has to do with renewables. When we build renewable generation, we have to provide a big subsidy. Now, a lot of people think, well, the wind and the sun are free. And this is true. Wind energy and solar energy is free. But the equipment needed to turn that energy into electricity is not free. That’s actually pretty expensive.
Now, imagine that we only had renewables on our grid. And when you’re setting prices, normally, the price at which you sell your goods is linked to your short run marginal operating cost, which for wind and solar is close to zero. Essentially, you’d be giving it away. How are you going to recover your capital costs for that expensive equipment if you have to give away your products? You’re never going to be able to do it. So basic economic theory will tell you that renewables will never be built without subsidies. They are always going to require subsidies because you will never be able to recover the capital costs to selling the electricity at the short run marginal operating cost of that electricity.
So we give subsidies to renewables. And that subsidy is higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. So the argument about gas pushing your bills up is nonsense. These subsidies are higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. And the way the new subsidies work is that the generators are guaranteed a fixed price, and they receive that by selling that electricity in the market. And then if that’s lower than this fixed price, they get a top up.
And it’s a one for one relationship. If you lower the wholesale price of electricity by one pound, you increase the subsidy cost by one pound. And the subsidies are added to our bills. They come straight out of our pockets. So when people say, oh, we’ve got to get off gas, we’ve got to stop marginal pricing. People talk about marginal pricing as if we’re some weird outlier in the world markets doing this strange marginal pricing thing, taking the most expensive form of generation to set the price.
Every deregulated power market in the world sets the electricity price through marginal pricing. In fact, most commodity markets do the same thing. This isn’t weird. It’s completely normal.
And if you decided to change price formation to lower the wholesale price, your bill will stay the same. You’re just moving money in different buckets around the bill. Now the bit that says wholesale price will go down, and the bit that says policy costs will go up. But the amount you pay will stay the same. And so this is the whole misinformation that we have.
The other issues with renewables are you’ve got to pay for backup. They have low energy density, so you need a lot more wires to connect them. A good sized gas power station, 800 megawatts. If you wanted an equivalent size wind farm, you need 60 turbines. So that’s 60 times more wires. But to get the same amount of electricity over the year, because your wind is only working about a third of the time compared with about 86% of the time for gas, you need something like 150 times the wires. You need 150 turbines.
All that gets added onto your bills. The cost of backup to make sure you’ve got generation available when it’s not windy and sunny, that goes straight onto the bill. And the real-time balancing cost, where you’re having to even out the impact of clouds and gusts of wind, all goes on the bill. And so this is why our bills are so high.
Drone footage shows hundreds of solar panels ripped apart and scattered across farmland after a powerful tornado tore through Wheatfield overnight. Homes in the area also suffered heavy damage as the violent storm carved a path of destruction. Photo credit Joemar Sombero
Energy Bad Boys draw the lessons from an Indiana tornado impacting power supply in their blog article Solar Scattered, Coal Still Standing. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
What an Indiana tornado revealed about the cost of fragile power
On Tuesday, March 10th, an EF-1 tornado destroyed the Dunns Bridge Solar I and II facilities owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO). The facilities, located outside of Wheatfield, Indiana, had2.4 million solar panels, totaling 700 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, and reportedly cost $1 billion to construct—a little over $1,400 per kilowatt (kW).
The Chief Deputy of Jasper County Sheriff’s Department, Brandon Napier, noted, “Just the path of the tornado that came through, we have several large solar fields to the east of the town here it went right through the solar field and just ripped a lot of them out.”
While the solar panels were damaged by the tornado, we are not aware of any reports of damage at the nearby R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, a 950 MW coal facility that NIPSCO was planning to retire at the end of 2025. However, it is still running thanks to a 202(C) order issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requiring the plant to continue operations. Click on the map below to explore the custom Google Map we made this week of the facilities.
To enlarge, open in new tab.
This article will explore the cost of the destroyed solar facility compared to the nearby R.M. Schahfer Plant, and explore how energy costs have changed in the NIPSCO service territory in response to changes in the company’s generation fleet, using some cool data from S&P Global.
According to S&P Global, the Dunns Bridge solar projects were built to “support Northern Indiana Public Service’s goal of becoming coal-free by 2028, reducing carbon emissions by more than 90 percent by 2030, compared to a 2005 baseline, according to the utility.”
The situation begs several questions:
If climate change is going to make the weather more extreme,how does it make any sense to shut down coal plants and build energy generation facilities, like solar, that are destroyed by extreme weather?
Are the company’s coal-free and emissions reduction goals increasing the company’s exposure to costs associated with weather events, and why should ratepayers be saddled with these additional costs?
Was there any damage to the R.M. Schahfer coal plant or the onsite battery storage facility at Dunns Bridge?
What type of insurance policy is in place for the solar facility, and what deductible would the company be required to pay, if any?
What liability, if any, does the company have for the cleanup of the site and surrounding areas?
How is any of this in the best interests of ratepayers?
The Cost of Tornado-Truncated Solar Facility
Let’s be incredibly uncharitable and look at the anticipated levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of the solar facility over its projected 25-year useful lifetime, and its actual, tornado-truncated lifetime.
Dunns Bridge I began generating power in June of 2023, producing a total of 1.3 million megawatt hours (MWh) up until December of 2025, the most recent month for which data are available. Dunns Bridge II began generating power in January of 2025, and through December, it produced 812,439 MW of power, which is good for a 21.3 percent capacity factor.
We calculated the LCOE over two time periods: a 25-year lifecycle, a standard assumption in the industry, and a 2-year lifecycle to account for the facility being destroyed very early in its lifecycle. The results are about what we would expect. Our estimated subsidized costs over 25 years are approximately equal to S&P Global’s reported PPA cost for the facilities, including subsidies.
Is this a fair comparison? Probably not, because the solar facility was almost certainly insured and will likely be rebuilt after the site is remediated. The question is: how much are the cleanup and replacement costs,and what is the insurance deductible for the damaged facility, and who has to pay them?
The Cost of the Nearby Coal Plant
In our upcoming LCOE study for Reliable Energy Inc. in Indiana, we found that the R.M. Schahfer plant was the most expensive coal plant in the state, due primarily to very high delivered fuel costs at the plant ($50 per MWh).
However, the December 2025 data from S&P Global, the most recent available, show the delivered fuel cost was about $27 per MWh, which substantially improves the economics of the plant, although this could possibly be the result of the company assuming the plant would retire at the end of the year, rather than being required to stay open.
At $70 per MWh, the Schahfer plant is competitive with subsidized solar
over a 25-year lifespan, cheaper than the unsubsidized cost over 25 years,
and a bargain compared with our admittedly uncharitable comparison
to the facility’s actual 2-year lifespan.
NIPSCO’s Changing Generation Profile
NIPSCO’s Dunns Bridge solar facilities are part of a larger trend away from coal-fired power generation toward natural gas, MISO market purchases, and increasingly, wind and solar ownership or power purchase agreements (PPAs).
This trend has coincided with a massive increase in the utilities’ estimated rate base. Data from S&P Global show NIPSCO’s rate base has more than doubled since 2016. You’ll notice that the rate base was essentially flat from 2000 to 2010 in non-inflation-adjusted terms. This is because electric companies are supposed to see their rate bases stabilize as their assets depreciate over time.
It’s also interesting to look at what’s causing the rate base growth. In the mid 2000s and 2010s, the growth in NIPSCO’s spending was driven by generation spending. However, transmission and distribution spending began to increase around 2018, and generation spending fell in 2021, but rebounded slightly in 2024.
Conclusion
There are lots of things that break when they get hit by a tornado,
but our power plants shouldn’t be one of them.
The demise of the Dunns Bridge I & II solar facilities by one of the weakest classifications of tornado should be a nudge to Indiana policymakers and utility regulators that shutting down dispatchable thermal plants in favor of flimsier wind and solar facilities is not a prudent course of action.
Frankly, the Trump administration should be lambasting companies like NIPSCO for continuing to pursue their voluntary decarbonization pledges when electricity bills are rising, and demand is soaring due to data centers. A few mean tweets might go a long way toward helping utility executives and their Wall Street investors understand they can no longer Green Plate the grid at the expense of everyday Americans.
Solar panels in field with the sun reflecting on the panels creating a glare. Source: Northern Indiana Public Service Company LLC (NIPSCO),
Science Matters 