Donald Larson - eGeneration Foundation Executive Director

A Message from the Director - The Great Green Mirage: How Wind and Solar Made Everything Worse

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane—back to the 1950s, when America still had ambition, steel in its spine, and a grip on reality. For 40 years, from Eisenhower to Reagan, nuclear power quietly rose to generate about 20% of our nation’s electricity. It was the marvel of engineering, a triumph of physics, and a monument to human achievement.

Then came the 3-Mile Island incident. No one died. No one was even hurt. But the bureaucrats lost their minds, and the regulators came crawling out of the woodwork like termites after a flood. A little regulation is good—we’re not savages—but what followed was a regulatory straightjacket, stitched together tightly by fear, fantasy, and a complete ignorance of basic grid mechanics.

Nuclear energy R&D? Sure, the government backed it. But unlike wind and solar, nuclear energy production was never subsidized, never mandated, and never handed a blank check in the form of Renewable Portfolio Standards. It earned its way into America’s power grid. It competed. It won. Until politics pulled the plug.

Now let’s talk about the 60-year science fair project that is wind and solar.

Since the 1970s, we’ve dumped more than $2 trillion dollars into wind and solar—not to develop it, mind you, but to keep it breathing. We’ve twisted state laws to pick winners and losers in the marketplace by mandating the use of renewables, propped it up with Renewable Energy Credits (which are basically reverse bailouts paid for by nuclear, hydro, and fossil fuel plants), and called it "green" while shipping in Chinese rare earth minerals by the megaton.

And what do we have to show for it?

Seventeen percent. That’s it. After 60 years of mandates, production subsidies, tax credits, and grid-bending acrobatics, wind and solar produce a combined 17% of our electricity—and only when the sun feels like shining and the wind feels like blowing.

Meanwhile, we’re spending billions on building transmission infrastructure for renewables, retrofitting the grid to try to make intermittent energy sources behave like stable ones (adding batteries made with China-sourced rare earth elements), and pretending that complexity somehow equals innovation.

It’s not innovation. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine strapped to a blender plugged into a solar panel. It’s expensive, it’s fragile, it’s prone to blackouts, and it’s making electricity cost more for everyone.

And here’s the kicker: because of all this extra complexity—backup generation, overbuilt capacity, transmission redundancy—carbon emissions went up drastically compared to us just installing nuclear and combined cycle natural gas for the same capacity, not down. That’s right: in our righteous crusade to go green, we’ve managed to make the environment worse and the economy weaker.

Congratulations. We’ve doubled down on stupid.

If wind and solar had been treated like nuclear—subsidized only for R&D, not production—they would have died in committee. No mandates, no backdoor payments, no “renewable energy quotas” written by people who couldn’t wire a light switch and have a total lack of understanding of grid mechanics. Without the government fixing the game, wind and solar wouldn’t be industries—they’d be Wikipedia entries.

But nuclear? Nuclear works. It works day or night, rain or shine, with no RECs, no virtue signaling, and no need to check the weather forecast before turning on your stove.

Big Tech figured it out. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, X(Formerly Twitter)—they’re ditching the windmills and solar panels and hugging the reactors. Why? Because when profit margins and environmental outcomes actually matter, the answer is - and has always been - advanced nuclear.

It’s time to end the fairy tale. It’s time to stop pretending the wind and sun care about your electricity bill. It’s time to rebuild a sane, reliable, carbon-free, cost-effective energy grid—with nuclear at its core.

Ohio can lead the way. We need to channel our best Nancy Reagan and "Just Say No" to wind and solar mandates, renewable energy credits, and renewable energy production subsidies, and say yes to common sense.