Can't run a factory or heat a home on feel-good vibes, but the chumps don’t believe that, yet. Gives new meaning to “huddled masses”.
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By Don Surber. He’s writing about Illinois, but as his headline suggests, this is occurring throughout blue state country: NY, New England, and wherever weak minds are found.
Even electricity is leaving blues states
New York state’s tax policy is exiling millionaires to Florida. California’s craziness is banishing billionaires.
But Illinois has them beat with its climate change laws that are forcing two-thirds of an electric plant in Elwood to take the advice of Suzy Bogguss and drive South with the one they love.
Reddy Kilowatt packed its power plant and headed for Texas, which welcomes gas-powered electric plants. The company that owns two-thirds of that plant is hauling away the equipment that will generate 900 megawatts of power for Texans.
This is the reaction to the 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature accomplishments, requires Illinois to phase out the burning of fossil fuels for electricity by 2045 and sets an earlier 2030 deadline for closing certain gas-fired plants.”
Elwood was among the plants that Democrat gave the arbitrary death penalty.
One year after the governor signed the law, the Chicago Tribune proudly endorsed Pritzker’s re-election.
Much to its surprise, the editorial board discovered the evil Elwood plant is shutting down ahead of schedule.
On Friday, the newspaper ran an editorial, “Owner of massive Elwood Energy plant isn’t waiting for Illinois closure deadlines. They’re literally moving the plant to Texas.”
The editorial said, “Imagine that an entire nuclear reactor were shutting down for good in northern Illinois. The move at Elwood Energy is the equivalent.”
Democrats already are shuttering nuclear power plants.
Democrats used the global cooling/global warming/climate change argument to get this law passed. That was stated goal.
But now the real goal of ending cheap energy is being revealed in real time—and peddled as an unintentional consequence. There are no unintended consequences in politics, just undisclosed real purposes.
Only now do the unwashed elitist masses in the Fourth Estate realize saving the world will hit utility customers hardest as Democrats seek to bring equality of income in which everyone is poor.
Except the politicians, of course.
The newspaper acted surprised that plant, which were told to shut down, is doing just that—but on its own schedule, not the state’s. Rather take the loss, Elwood Energy sold the plant with Hull Street buying two-thirds of the operation. Now Hull Street is relocating them rather than let them rust out.
The Tribune said, “This startling development should raise alarm bells in Springfield, which already has heard warnings from experts that power capacity could fall short of what’s needed in Illinois within the next five years.”
The alarm went off 5 years ago when the bill was debated.
The move by Hull Street means Illinois won’t put the generator out of commission and save the world. The move means all Illinois accomplished was moving 900 megawatts of power out of state.
The newspaper said, “So not only will there be no reduction in overall emissions due to CEJA, the Chicago area will lose 900 megawatts of power that had been critical to meeting peak demand and helped dampen prices during those peak periods.
“Here’s some context on just how much juice that is. Just down the road from Elwood is Morris, home to Constellation Energy’s Dresden nuclear station, where two reactors combine to generate up to 1,845 megawatts. The six Elwood gas turbines that are heading south are the equivalent of one of Dresden’s reactors in terms of capacity.”
Very Much Related:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/18/cracks-appear-in-climate-consensus-as-germanys-energy-minister-admits-renewable-energy-is-ruining-the-country/
Cracks Appear in Climate Consensus as Germany’s Energy Minister Admits Renewable Energy is Ruining the Country
When Simon Wakter, Political Adviser to Sweden’s Minister for Energy, posted on X last Wednesday with a simple “Wow, incredible article” and a clapping emoji, he captured the shock rippling through Europe’s energy commentariat. The target of his applause was not some fringe sceptic but Germany’s own Economy and Energy Minister, Katherina Reiche.
In a guest column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reiche delivered a verdict that would have been career-ending heresy only a year ago: “One fact has been concealed for too long: an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save.” To anyone who has watched Germany’s Energiewende — that totemic experiment in decarbonisation-by-decree — unfold like a slow-motion train wreck, Reiche’s words land like a thunderclap from the Establishment itself.
Here is a senior CDU Minister in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Government openly admitting that two decades of Green-inspired fantasy have saddled the continent’s industrial powerhouse with hidden costs now running, according to estimates she cites, at €36 billion a year and climbing towards €90 billion. Grid expansions, backup power for intermittent wind and solar and the sheer inefficiency of trying to run a modern economy on the weather: all of it, she says, must stop being airbrushed out of the official narrative. The self-deception, she warns, is over.
This is not mere technocratic tinkering. It is the first major public crack in the ideological edifice that has dominated German — and by extension European — energy policy since the anti-nuclear, beatnik ’68ers’ generation seized the cultural high ground. Rupert Darwall chronicled the phenomenon with great precision in Green Tyranny: how a handful of German Greens, personified by the sneaker-wearing Joschka Fischer swearing in as Hesse’s environment minister in 1985, exported their peculiar red-green blend of anti-capitalist zeal and romantic environmentalism across the continent and beyond.