RICH LOWRY: New Jersey’s wind debacle

In one of his classic New Jersey ballads, Bruce Springsteen sings of the sun “rising over them refinery towers.” If New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy had gotten his way, the Boss would need to update the lyric to rhapsodize about enormous wind turbines looming on the horizon instead.

Murphy’s obsession with wind power is one of the reasons that the state’s gubernatorial race is competitive and Republican Jack Ciattrelli has a chance to upset Murphy’s potential Democratic successor Mikie Sherrill in a much-watched off-year election. Gov. Murphy brought a European-style energy strategy to New Jersey and got European-style results.

Murphy’s idea was to decommission fossil fuel and nuclear plants and build up wind. It was a rainbow-and-ponies strategy, and sure enough, the decommissioning happened, while the wind did not.

If you constrain the supply of something, while demand for it goes up, prices will inevitably increase. New Jerseyans understandably have not appreciated this lesson in Econ 101, which has come out of their pocketbooks. Rates increased by about 20 percent beginning in June of this year, on top of what were already some of the highest rates in the country. There is yet more where that came from projected for next year.

When Murphy took office, the prevailing winds of fashionable opinion said that wind power was the future. So New Jersey set out to become the wind capital of the United States. It was going to get 3,500 megawatts from offshore wind. No, 7,000. Come to think of it, why not make it 11,000? The higher the number, the greater the climate virtue.

At first, New Jersey set a goal of achieving 100 percent clean energy by 2050, then goosed it to 2035. It’s all come a cropper, as wind has been a no-show. The pandemic and Trump administration regulatory hostility to wind didn’t help, but the basic problem is that wind is uneconomical, even with the feds and the state showering wind companies with lavish subsidies and credits.

Meanwhile, New Jersey took out coal, natural gas and nuclear plants without replacing them, and the governor fought pipelines with the resolve of Winston Churchill vowing to resist the Nazis on the beaches and landing grounds.

Neighboring Pennsylvania, also with a Democratic governor, is a notable contrast. It actually decommissioned more coal-fired plants than New Jersey did but did not suffer shortfalls in capacity because it readily embraced natural gas as an alternative rather than chasing an energy will-o’-the-wisp.

Murphy’s make-believe plan was that by 2050 New Jersey’s power mix would be 34 percent wind, 23 percent solar, 16 percent nuclear and 6 percent biogas, with another 21 percent from out-of-state wind and solar. Here, back in reality, after eight years of stupendous clean-energy exertions, New Jersey still gets 90 percent of its energy from natural gas and nuclear.

Energy is a dominant issue in the gubernatorial race and deserves to be. Murphy is the author of an asinine, entirely predictable policy failure that directly affects the welfare of residents of his state. If Murphy is capable of introspection, he might want to contemplate the question asked in another Springsteen song long ago: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.