US renewables receive unfair advantage

State administrations are using a flawed metric to justify green energy projects

State governments in the US are pushing a green thumb on the energy policy scale. Cost-benefit studies commissioned by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, for example, determined that the benefits of several proposed (and recently cancelled by the developers’) offshore wind projects were twice their costs, despite those projects’ contractual purchase prices for electricity that were 3–4 times higher than wholesale market prices. The reason: the estimated reductions in carbon emissions accounted for 60% of the total benefits. However, the state used a flawed measurement, the social cost of carbon (SCC), to calculate the benefits of CO₂ reductions and justify projects that, if built, wou