Trucks and cars near a Shell gas station in Centerville, Texas, circa June 2024. Many Americans rely on fossil fuels for their daily lives, such as generating electricity and transportation. With its reliability and cost advantages, especially with the currently fragile EV market, fossil fuels may be irreplaceable. (Shutterstock/MMCRP)

Why American Consumers Will Not and Should Not Abandon Fossil Fuels

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Americans will struggle to deal with the reliability, efficiency, cost, and adverse environmental effects of fossil fuel alternatives.

The question before us: “Is the American consumer ready to give up fossil fuels?” Please allow me to change it a bit: “How much more would Americans be willing to pay to shift massively toward such unconventional alternatives as wind and solar power and electric vehicles (EVs) and politically approved appliances in a large-scale transformation away from fossil fuels?” That reformulation of the question incorporates both the quality and cost dimensions of the choices among energy technologies.

How Reliability Issues Plague Fossil Fuel Alternatives

Unconventional electricity is inherently unreliable, and because it cannot be scheduled (“dispatched”), it cannot synchronize the generators in a given grid system. Both the direct unreliability of sunlight and wind flows and the synchronization problem yield a substantial reduction in service reliability; the economic and other costs of blackouts are not trivial. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates (Table 1b) of “capacity factors”—the percent of the time that a powerplant can be expected to generate power—are summarized in the following table.

The problems attendant upon EVs are enormous in terms of driving range, recharging time and infrastructure, towing and hauling characteristics, performance during cold and hot weather, and on and on. With the end of massive regulatory subventions and financial subsidies for EVs, that market has collapsed. Electric appliances under most conditions are more costly to own and operate relative to gas appliances—the relative performance advantages are highly dependent on localized conditions—and requirements for increased energy “efficiency” and reduced water use create an additional set of problems that Americans have never accepted voluntarily.

Why Energy Density........

© The National Interest