All of the Above, Graded on What a Family Actually Needs From Power

Every politician in America is for "all of the above." Say it at a rally and the crowd nods. Say it at a hearing and nobody objects. It is the "I support apple pie" of energy policy. The trouble is that it tells you nothing, because the fight is always over the percentage sign after each item on the list.

So let us do what the slogan avoids. Let us grade each source on the test that matters to a real household. It is January. It is six in the evening. The sun went down an hour ago, the temperature is in the teens, the oven is on, the furnace blower is running, the kids are doing homework under the lights and somebody is charging a phone. Does the power come on, and does it cost a reasonable amount? That is the exam. No credit for good intentions.

What the test is really measuring

Electricity has a property that surprises people. It cannot be stored cheaply in large amounts, so the amount generated has to match the amount used at nearly every instant. If you want the technical picture, How the Power Grid Really Works and Why Supply Must Match Demand Every Second walks through it. For now, hold on to a simple idea: some sources can be turned up when you need them, and some deliver only when the weather or the water allows. The first kind is called dispatchable. The second kind is not.

Five questions, then, for each source.

1. Dispatchable? Can the operator ramp it up at six in the evening in winter?
2. Fuel on site? Is the fuel sitting in a pile, a tank or a reactor core, or does it arrive minute by minute?
3. Land footprint? How much ground does a plant of useful size take, qualitatively?
4. Build time? How long does it take to put one up, in the real world?
5. Weather exposure? What does a cold snap, a heat wave or a calm day do to it?

I am deliberately leaving out prices and output figures. They move with the year, the region and the subsidy, and any number I printed would be stale by the time you read it. What does not move is the physics, and the physics is what decides the grade.

The scorecard

Now let me add the commentary the table cannot hold.

Natural gas

Gas is the workhorse. A gas plant can be started and ramped in a fraction of the time a coal or nuclear plant needs, which is why grid operators lean on it to cover the swings. The fuel comes through a pipeline network and, in many places, from underground storage that was filled in the summer. The footprint is small, and a plant can be built in a few years. If a family wants to know why the lights stayed on during an ordinary cold night, the best single answer in much of the country is a gas turbine somewhere.

The weakness is on the supply side. A gas plant is only as reliable as the pipeline that feeds it. In the February 2021 freeze in Texas, gas wells, pipelines and processing equipment faltered at the same time that demand soared, and several gas plants went offline for lack of fuel. Other sources failed too, wind turbines among them, along with some coal and nuclear units. The lesson of that week is not "gas bad." It is that every source needs winterization, and that a grid that relies on one fuel for too much of its supply is one cold front away from a problem.

Coal

Coal has one great virtue that people forget: you can see the fuel. It is the only power source whose reliability you can check with a tape measure. It sits in a pile by the plant, often with weeks of supply, and when the weather turns it is not waiting for a pipeline compressor to hum. The weakness is cost, emissions rules and the plain fact that coal plants take time to ramp and cost a lot to keep running part-time. Many have been retired, and the question for a grid operator is not whether coal is perfect. It is whether a plant that has already been built, and that can run when everything else is struggling, should be shut down before its replacement exists. That is a reliability question and deserves a straight answer from regulators, not a slogan.

Nuclear

Here is the source that most scores well on the test and worst on the calendar. A nuclear plant runs night and day, in any weather, on fuel that is loaded for a long cycle, typically on the order of eighteen to twenty-four months between refuelings. It uses very little land for the electricity it produces. Its emissions at the stack are nil.

The build time is where America stumbles. The two new reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, Units 3 and 4, came into service in 2023 and 2024, years behind schedule. That tells you what a first-of-a-kind project costs in a country that has not built many in a generation. It does not tell you the technology is flawed. France built a large fleet in a short period of time, and I compare the French and German paths in France Built Reactors, Germany Shut Them, and America Argued in a Side-by-Side. Why we slowed down is in Why America Stopped Building Reactors and What the NRC Actually Does, and the waste promise that Washington never kept is in Yucca Mountain and the Nuclear Waste Promise Washington Broke.

Hydro

Hydropower is the original clean, dispatchable source. Water behind a dam is stored energy that an operator can release when demand rises. It is hard to beat for reliability where it exists. But it exists only where geography allows, most of the best sites have been used, and permitting a new dam is a process measured in decades. Drought and snowpack matter, so a dry year is a smaller supply. Hydro is a precious asset to protect and maintain, and a poor plan for adding much new power.

Wind

Wind turbines produce power when the wind blows within a usable range. That sounds obvious until you realize what it means on a cold, still winter evening, which is exactly when a high-pressure system parks over a region and the turbines idle. A wind farm on a dead-calm evening is a very expensive sculpture garden. The farmland under the turbines can still be farmed, and landowners who lease space for them get a check, which is a real benefit in rural America. The build time is short.

The weakness is that wind is a fuel saver and not a capacity provider. It reduces the amount of gas or coal you burn when the wind blows. It cannot be called on when you need it. A grid with a lot of wind needs something else standing by, and the cost of that backup belongs in the price of wind, though it rarely shows up there. The federal production tax credit for wind, first enacted in 1992, has made the industry a creature of the tax code as much as of the market. Judge it by what it delivers at six in the evening, not by what it delivers in a spring windstorm.

Solar

Solar produces zero at night. I have nothing against solar panels after dark, by the way. They are very restful. But that is not a political statement. It is the rotation of the earth. In winter the days are short, the sun is low, and the evening peak in demand, when people get home and cook and turn on the lights, arrives after the sunset. Grid operators in sunny regions have a name for the resulting shape on their demand chart, the "duck curve," because the net demand sags at midday and then climbs steeply right as the sun sets.

Solar's strengths are real. It can be built fast, in small pieces, on rooftops or in fields. It does a fine job on hot summer afternoons, when air conditioners drive demand and the sun is at its strongest. Its weakness is that its best hours rarely line up with the hours the family needs it most, which brings us to batteries.

Batteries

A battery does not produce a single watt. It moves energy through time. If a solar farm fills a battery in the afternoon, the battery can release it in the evening, and that is a valuable service. Batteries are quick to install, they respond in a fraction of a second, and they help keep the grid steady.

Their limit is duration. Most grid batteries today are designed to deliver for a few hours, which suits an evening peak, and not for the multi-day stretch of a winter storm. They are a tool for shifting power, not a source for keeping the lights on through a week of ice. A battery is a great pair for a solar panel, and a bad excuse for retiring the plant that can run all night.

The argument

Let me put this as a debater would. I want to lay out the case in numbered premises and then test it against the best objection.

1. A reliable grid needs enough dispatchable power to cover the worst hours, not the average ones. The worst hours come in deep winter and in summer heat waves, and on cold still evenings.
2. Wind and solar are valuable, but they supply energy and not assured capacity. Their output at the hour of peak demand can be low or zero.
3. Batteries help for hours, not days.
4. Therefore a sound portfolio is one that guarantees enough firm capacity from gas, nuclear, hydro and, where it already exists, coal, and then adds wind and solar where they save fuel and cut costs.
5. And the way to get there is to let each source compete on what it actually delivers, including the cost of backing it up, rather than on a subsidy or a slogan.

Here is the strongest objection. Supporters of an aggressive wind-and-solar build-out argue that costs have fallen, that fuel-free generation protects families from fuel price spikes, that big regional grids can smooth out local weather, and that batteries will keep improving. Every one of those points has some truth. Fuel prices do swing, and a source with no fuel bill hedges that. A larger grid does average out a calm spell in one region with a breeze in another.

Here is my answer. Granting all of that, the exam is still the January evening. A bigger grid helps only if the transmission lines exist, and those take years to permit, which is a problem I covered in NEPA Explained, the 1970 Law Where Paperwork Outlasts the Project. Cheap electricity at noon in May is no help at six in January. And a policy that retires firm plants before replacements are on the ground is a bet with the family's heat as the stake. Build the wind and the solar, by all means. Just do not pretend they are the same thing as a plant you can call at suppertime.

What this means for the rest of your budget

Energy is not only the electric bill. It is built into freight, fertilizer and food, which is why a poor grid decision costs you at the grocery store too. If you want to see the whole household picture, work through Trace Your Family's Energy Dollar From the Meter and Pump to the Grocery Bill. And for how America found its oil and gas in the first place, the story of The Texas Wildcatter Who Spent Twenty Years Cracking the Shale Code is the best example of what happens when government gets out of the way. Remember also how Eight Days Into His Term, Reagan Scrapped Oil Price Controls for Good showed that a market left free to work finds supply that planners cannot.

The bottom line

• "All of the above" is the right goal, but the grade for each source is set by one test: does it deliver when your family needs it, in the worst hour of the worst season?
• Natural gas, nuclear, hydro and existing coal are the sources that can be called on. Wind and solar save fuel but do not guarantee supply, and batteries move energy through the day without making any.
• Ask your state utility regulator and your representatives what the plan is for the coldest evening of the year, and how many firm plants are being retired before replacements are running.
• Support building new nuclear and gas capacity and the transmission and permitting reforms that make it possible, and judge every subsidy by what it delivers, not what it promises.