The wonderful “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money” statement attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen may be apocryphal, but it remains a prescient warning to our nation’s leaders. At a time when Congress is throwing billions of dollars around like pocket change based on claims of scientists and engineers, a real quote of Dirksen may be equally important (Congressional Record: June 16, 1965, p. 13884):
…One time in the House of Representatives [a colleague] told me a story about a proposition that a teacher put to a boy. He said, ‘Johnny, a cat fell in a well 100 feet deep. Suppose that cat climbed up 1 foot and then fell back 2 feet. How long would it take the cat to get out of the well?
The Boston Globe recently reported that National Grid will pay 20.7 cents per kilowatt-hour for Cape Wind electricity production starting in 2013, with increases of about 3.5% a year for 15 years. This radically uneconomic cost figure challenges the pro-wind studies of the project–and confirms the analyses of authors at MasterResoource.
A Charles River Associates (CRA) report previously indicated that the Cape Wind projects would save electricity customers billions of dollars. This expectation was immediately challenged in a MasterResource post by Glenn Schleede, who documented the study’s out-of-date data, doubtful assumptions, and missing costs. His conclusion was that the electric customers in New England – as well as the taxpayers – deserve a far more complete and objective analysis of the potential cost impacts on them of the proposed Cape Wind project than was provided by CRA and released by Cape Wind.…
[David Kruetzer is research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.. This is his first post at MasterResource.]
Building on the misconception that renewable energy is cheap, some legislators and activists propose mandating that minimum fractions of our electric supply come from designated renewables. Wind and solar are at the top of this list. Al Gore wants 100 percent renewables in less than a decade; others propose less ambitious targets.
The problem is that renewables are expensive, not to mention unreliable and environmentally questionable. Mandates would only force consumers to pay ever higher electric rates as this minimum in an renewable electricity standard (RES) grows year by year.
The Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation recently analyzed the economic impact of an RES, such as proposed in federal legislation.…