Here is the Maryland discussio

When a state writes net-zero into law, it lands on the grid and in the family budget. For example, Maryland is a typical blue state and a member of the PJM grid, and the number is hard to argue with: Residential electricity prices are up about 44 percent since 2020.

The reason is no mystery. Maryland has lost roughly 6,000 megawatts of its own generating capacity, most of it from coal plants that shut down, and it is largely not replacing it. The same thing is happening next door, with New Jersey down nearly 30 percent and Delaware down almost half of their in-state generation since 2018.

And none of it was an accident. In 2022, the legislature passed the Climate Solutions Now Act, ordering greenhouse-gas emissions down 60 percent from 2006 levels by 2031 and to net zero by 2045.

Maryland also belongs to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which taxes and caps what fossil-fuel plants are allowed to emit. RGGI has added an estimated $4.6 billion to the state’s electric bills, and it has steadily made reliable baseload plants too expensive to keep running, which is exactly how they end up closed.

A Baltimore Sun analysis found the RGGI charge can equal 44 percent of a plant’s gross revenue. And in a detail that tells you what this is really about, $282 million out of that fund is being spent this year not to clean the air but to help plug a hole in the state budget.

That pattern, money raised in the name of the climate and spent on something else, runs straight through Maryland’s energy programs. The state holds the Wagner oil-fired plant in Baltimore to no more than 5 percent of its capacity. It tacks an EmPower charge onto electric bills that pulls in about $300 million a year to weatherize low-income homes, which is income redistribution by another name, most of it routed through nonprofits.

And the books are a black hole. The state comptroller has admitted Maryland cannot even say how much taxpayer money flows to these groups; the estimates run from $1 billion to more than $6 billion a year, with no central, transparent way to check where any of it goes. When someone finally looked, they found $26 million handed to 23 Baltimore nonprofits, every last one of which had broken the state’s solicitation laws and been declared delinquent.

Having closed its own power plants, Maryland now buys electricity from its neighbors. It imports about 42 percent of its power from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, a load equal to everything the state’s households use. Imported power costs more and pollutes more.

Closing the last two fossil plants in Baltimore would require a new $1.5 billion transmission line to Pennsylvania, which is a big part of why the transmission charge on a Maryland bill is now climbing faster than the cost of the power itself.

A second line, $500 million to link Pennsylvania and Virginia, will be paid for in part by Maryland ratepayers even though the electricity is headed to Virginia. Electrons, it turns out, do not stop at the state line.

What Annapolis wants in place of the plants it is closing is an all-electric economy run on wind, solar, and batteries, with electric heat pumps replacing gas furnaces. Every building over 35,000 square feet is forced to go all-electric or pay a yearly fee. Then a genuinely cold January arrives, everything electric runs flat out at once, and the bills go through the roof.

At the same time, demand is climbing to feed the data centers, or “Intelligence Centers,” as West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey likes to call them. Artificial intelligence matters and is worth protecting.

But the state has found itself a convenient story, blaming the data centers and Washington for the price spikes, when its own policies are a big part of the cause.

The giveaway is in the numbers: electricity prices are climbing fastest in the states where demand is actually falling, and transmission costs are rising on the back of all that decentralized wind, solar, and imported power.

Meanwhile, PJM, the grid operator, is warning of possible voltage collapse and blackouts as soon as the summer of 2027. Maybe that will wake somebody up.

Maryland is a failed state, of course, because it’s an urban-dominated one and I recently offered a couple of good friends my thoughts as to why such states fail more often than not:

1. City folks have zero understanding of practical issues because urban life removes them from reality.

2. City people are also accustomed to dependency and become too comfortable with it. They assume there will be public transportation, public sewers, and much else that we don’t depend upon.

3. Cities are largely unmanageable and, thus, tend toward corruption.

4. Cities tend to gravitate toward the rich and poor with a small middle class, thus allowing the rich to exploit the poor as serfs, but throwing them public sector bones to keep them from going French Revolution.

5. Republicans simply write off cities, when they should be offering alternatives.

Jefferson wasn’t wrong...

One of those friends offered his own list:

City folks:

Q: Where does electric come from? A: Wall receptacles.

Q: Where does water come from? A: Spigots.

Q: What about sewage? A: That little handle on the toilet tank.

Q. Where does food come from? A: Kroger

And so on...