This week, Governor Evers released an update on his Clean Energy Plan and the Office of Sustainability. While politicians like Governor Evers paint everything as solar-powered rainbows and unicorns, hardworking Wisconsin families are footing the bill. Governor Tony Evers’s 2019 executive order for 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2050 is a classic example of top-down government overreach. It was never passed by the legislature as a binding law, yet it drives utility planning and state policy through the Clean Energy Plan. The result? Higher power bills, greater risk of blackouts, and fewer choices for ordinary people.
This is not serious energy policy. It is ideology dressed up as progress. Wind and solar might sound nice to some in press releases, but they are unreliable sources of energy. Wisconsin winters do not wait for the sun or wind before a cold snap requires us all to crank up the heat. Retiring reliable coal and natural gas plants while betting the grid on intermittent sources is a recipe for costly disasters. In fact, Midwest grid operators have already sounded alarms about reliability.
The costs of so-called carbon-free are real and immediate. Building the new infrastructure needed to achieve these goals will cost billions, paid for by ratepayers across Wisconsin. Families are already squeezed by inflation and now face steadily rising electric bills. Manufacturers and farmers who keep Wisconsin’s economy running will also pay more, making them less competitive.
Milwaukee County shows how these “goals” play out at the local level, with real impact on taxpayers. County Executive David Crowley oversaw the county’s Climate Action 2050 Plan, a net-zero scheme for county operations by 2050. The plan took four full years to develop, starting with a 2021 board resolution and reaching approval in 2025 under Crowley’s watch.
County officials put the extra price tag at roughly $441 million over 25 years. That money comes from taxpayers, not from thin air, to pay for replacing buildings, systems, vehicles, light bulbs and more. Even though the county has already cut emissions by about 46 percent since 2005, leaders are still pushing for more spending on solar panels, electric vehicles, and building overhauls while the county wrestles with budget shortfalls and already increasing property taxes.
This is the pattern. Progressive officials like Evers and Crowley set ambitious targets that sound virtuous to appease their environmental special interests, then demand more money from the people who actually pay the bills. Lower-income households feel the fiscal pain the most because energy costs and local taxes take up a larger share of their income.
Supporters wave away these concerns with talk of long-term climate benefits. The truth is simpler. One state’s or county’s actions will not change global temperatures in any meaningful way. China and other major emitters keep expanding fossil fuel use, while Wisconsin families get the higher costs and reliability risks.
Wisconsin needs energy that is affordable, reliable, and available when people need it. An all-of-the-above approach that includes natural gas, nuclear, and existing resources makes far more sense than pie-in-the-sky carbon-free mandates. Evers’s statewide goal and Crowley’s multi-year county plan illustrate the problem with letting climate ideology drive energy policy. Taxpayers and ratepayers deserve better than experiments that raise their costs and threaten the power they depend on every day.
