It looks like Britain will be losing its electrical supply before too long.

It was in July of this year that the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee - prop. Tim Yeo - told the government that it must set a deadline for coal-fired power stations to install technology massively to cut their emissions, or they must be shut down.

In so doing, the committee sought to add to the burden on an industry which is already, for diverse reasons, failing to get to grips with the looming electricity shortage - offering a strategy which would make it near certain that the lights went out in 2012 or sooner.

Now, from the same House of Commons which brought you this lunacy, we have the Business and Enterprise Committee, headed by another Conservative MP - this time Peter Luff. His committee is warning that Britain is threatened by an "energy crunch" with disastrous social and economic consequences.

Included in President-elect Barack Obama's energy plan, "New Energy for America," is a requirement that utilities generate at least 25% of the country's electricity from renewable sources of energy like solar and wind power by 2025.

Last year, CEI published a report, Gone with the Wind, explaining why such a requirement, known as a renewable portfolio standard, is unfair to states in the southeast, where electricity is cheap and the potential for renewables is low.

Yesterday, the Cato Institute published a report that asks how policymakers could favor a policy so politically correct and so economically suspect.

In a January 17, 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Senator Obamasaidthat "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" under his plan to fight global warming. He also said that under his plan, "if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them."

Cross Posted at Power and Control