Heidi Alexander: “Yes, and I thank the Senator from Arizona. The United States uses almost 20 percent of all the electricity in the world…”

“Yes, and I thank the Senator from Arizona. The United States uses almost 20 percent of all the electricity in the world, and we need electricity that we can rely on. We don't want to flip the switch and have the lights not come on. We don't want to go to work and have the generators not working. So we use a lot of electricity, and that comes from baseload power. That is typically, in our country, coal, nuclear, and now natural gas. Wind is intermittent. It usually blows at night. Usually it blows only about a third of the time, and you either use it or lose it. So relying on wind power to run a country that uses 20 percent of all the electricity in the world is the energy equivalent of going to war in sailboats when nuclear ships are available. Baseload power is undercut by this intermittent wind power because of this subsidy. This subsidy is so large that wind developers can, in some cases, give away their electricity and still make a profit. And in some cases they pay the utilities to take their wind power, making the baseload power that we need to rely on for the long term less economical. This leads to the closing of nuclear plants and coal plants.”