Can going green pay off (in board games)?

My husband and I enjoy playing board games. We don't play that often now with kids around, but one of our newest favorites is "Power Grid." It's a game where you buy power plants and expand your grid network around the country to power more cities than your opponent(s). The power plants are run with a variety of fuel sources including: coal, oil, combination coal/oil, trash, nuclear, wind, and fusion. The power plants also vary in 1) cost to buy them, and 2) the number of cities they can power. Each player can have a maximum of 3 (or 4 in 2 player) power plants in their portfolio. Once you have your maximum, you upgrade old plants as better plants become available. You also have to buy the appropriate fuel for each of your plants every turn to power your cities. The prices of fuel go up and down during the game. If lots of people are all relying on one fuel source the price goes up, just as it does in real life. High demand = high prices.

When I first started playing power grid, I thought it was a really clever game because it seemed to mirror the energy markets of the world. This game was not only a fun strategy game, but informative as well. However, being the eco-minded person that I am, I was always drawn to the wind plants because they were clean, renewable energy and I didn't have to buy any fuel for them. The future! But I quickly noticed that when I picked the wind plants I started losing. I mentioned this to my husband and he replied that he thought he had read "ignore green plants" if you want to win Power Grid on the message boards.

I set out to test my suspicion by playing a game with my husband. I bought fossil fuel plants to start because those are the only plants available in the beginning. As soon as the first wind plant turned up I bought it and vowed to only buy wind plants. It didn't last long. After a few turns I had adjust my rule and buy a trash powered plant. My justification was that even though trash is dirty and produces a lot of toxic byproducts when burned, at least it is not a fossil fuel. Eliminating fossil fuels is, of course, key to fighting climate change. I bought the trash plant because it could power 6 cities and I needed to up the number of cities that I could power FAST if I wanted to stay competitive. The wind plants weren't showing up often enough, and they didn't power nearly as many cities as many of the trash, nuclear, or fossil fuel plants. On one turn in the first half of the game I had to pass on buying a new power plant altogether because there were no wind (or trash) options.

For much of the game, despite my limitations in only buying wind (with the exception of my one trash plant), I stayed somewhat competitive. My husband was always a bit ahead of me in terms of the number of cities he could power. This gave him more money, and more power to buy more cities, which kept him closer to winning the entire game. Unlike me, he relied heavily on fossil fuel plants (the prices of the fossil fuels were unusually cheap due to no competition from me too) and nuclear plants.

Towards the end of the game I was once again running out of options, until, due to a lucky draw, I was able to buy a fusion plant, the most expensive power plant in the game. Fusion plants do not exist, but if they did they would be clean and incredibly powerful. Yet, in this same turn I could have bought a coal plant for a significantly cheaper price that would power more cities than a fusion plant. Really? Going fossil fuel in this instance would have allowed me to surpass my husband in the number of cities powered, and freed up cash to buy enough cities to surpass my husband and very possibly win the whole game.

My husbands winning energy portfolio (oil, coal and nukes)

My losing portfolio of wind, trash and fusion

Bottom line is, the game "Power Grid" is stacked against wind (renewable) energy and heavily favors the old ways of thinking on energy: fossil fuels and nuclear. It is  impossible to win the game by relying on renewables. The renewable wind energy plants it does offer are expensive, often weak, and few and far between. The nuclear plants are powerful, but artificially cheap compared to today's real energy market realities where nuclear plants are shutting down because the economics simply don't work. The coal and oil plants in the game are abundant, powerful, and cheap. The game does not reflect today's rapid growth in the renewable energy sector, or current projections of renewable energy sources reaching grid parity with fossil fuel sources in the near future.

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