Category — Windpower: History and Issues

The debate surrounding the Production Tax Credit (PTC) intensified last quarter following several high-profile attempts by Congress to extend the credit before it expires at year-end. Industry warnings of precipitous declines in clean-tech investment and imminent job losses have reached a fevered pitch. The New York Times, for example, reflexively accused budget-hawks in Congress of being preoccupied with safeguarding the dominance of the oil and gas industries.

The idea that wind, which represents less than 3% of total electricity generation in the country after huge taxpayer benefits and state mandates, could threaten the continued use of fossil fuels in electric generation is fantasy. It  demonstrates a general ignorance about wind energy’s purpose and its limited contribution to our energy portfolio.

While we might forgive a newspaper editor’s misunderstanding of the complexities of renewable energy policy, it’s quite another thing to see the same level of ignorance on display on Capitol Hill by the very people tasked with understanding and voting on these policies.

Last month, the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures invited fellow House members to speak on behalf of bills they introduced or co-sponsored that would extend more than sixty expiring tax provisions, including the PTC. Of the nearly thirty witnesses who testified, one-third pressed for immediate extension of the credit. [Read more →]

Ending industrial wind subsidies is a quadruple win: it fosters real jobs, promotes economic growth, protects endangered species, and elevates environmental values over image-making.

The public is coming to this view, not only energy realists. In the face of repeated efforts to extend (seemingly perpetual) wind energy subsidies by industry lobbyists, taxpayers and grass root environmentalists have said: ENOUGH.

Informed and inspired by a loose but growing national coalition of groups opposed to more giveaways with no scientifically proven net benefits, thousands of citizens called their senators and representatives – and rounded up enough Nay votes to run four different bills aground. For once, democracy worked.

A shocked American Wind Energy Association and its allies began even more aggressive recruiting of well-connected Democrat and Republican political operatives and cosponsors – and introducing more proposals like HR 3307 to extend the Production Tax Credit (PTC).

Parallel efforts were launched in state legislatures, to maintain mandates, subsidies, feed-in tariffs, renewable energy credits, and other “temporary” ratepayer and taxpayer obligations. [Read more →]

This month, two subcommittees of the House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee [1] held a joint hearing,  “Impact of Tax Policies on the Commercial Application of Renewable Energy Technology.”

I was one of nine witnesses testifying. In addition to myself, the let-the-market-decide witnesses were Dr. Benjamin Zycher, Visiting Scholar, American Enterprise Institute, Tax and Other Subsidies for Renewable Energy Should Be Abandoned; and Margo Thorning, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, American Council for Capital Formation (testimony here).

The subcommittee Republicans were prepared, well informed, and interested in drawing out the facts. The Democrats, on the defensive, complained that the hearing was happening, argued the subcommittees lacked the jurisdiction to hold the hearing, and claimed that renewables were being short-changed compared to oil and gas.

A summary of my testimony (full version here) follows:

Background and Purpose

Energy policy in the United States calls for the aggressive deployment of renewable generation which has led to an explosion of expensive renewable resources that are variable, operating largely off-peak, off-season and are located in rural areas with limited transmission. [Read more →]

Industrial wind turbines in human habitats are becoming increasingly controversial and subject to environmental laws and restrictions. To this end, a long, urgent letter was sent to the Attorney Generals of Canada, the Premiers, and to the Prime Minister of Canada with copies to every Parliamentarian in the country as well as the Senate.

The senseless and wasteful proliferation of industrial wind factories across North America impacts the Canadian and U.S. economy, the environment, the health of people including the disabled, the elderly, and children, who depend on the legal system for protection and redress. We have the opportunity to learn from the errors of Europe, and stop the carnage now.

Industrial wind turbines are not green. They do not produce electricity, less than half of one percent internationally, despite massive, thoughtless, energy sprawl. They harm humans, wildlife, and drive the economy into disarray. Witness the plight of Greece, Spain, Italy and many others.

With over 600 anti-wind groups in North American and Europe, and with 2,800 worldwide, the imperative nature for a moratorium call is clear and irrepressible.

An excerpt from the full letter concerning health issues of residents near wind turbines follows. [Read more →]

It was an opinion-page editorial that was not warmly received by my employer at the time, Enron Corp. “Wind power poses several major dilemmas,” my Washington Times piece read.

Among them, it remains uneconomical despite heavy subsidies from ratepayers and taxpayers over the last two decades—through 1995 the Department of Energy (DOE) had spent $900 million in wind energy subsidies. Second, wind farms are noisy, land intensive, unsightly, and hazardous to birds, including endangered species.

In response, Ken Karas, chairman & CEO of Enron Wind Corporation, wrote to Tom White, chairman & CEO of Enron Renewables Corporation:

Does Bradley still work for Enron? If so, I believe he should be terminated. This article is pure yellow journalism….

I was not terminated, but I reached a (fair) agreement with Enron CEO Ken Lay that I would stop writing about windpower given the obvious commercial interest and stockholder stake Enron had in this sector. My job was important to me, and I was able to advance my ideals in other ways by remaining an internal voice for free markets and climate realism (versus alarmism).

Here is the Washington Times article reprinted with slight revision by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. At the (almost) 15-year mark, and as an early windpower ‘expose’, how do the arguments hold up today? [Read more →]

One thousand in-depth posts, 135 different contributors, and 1.2 million views to date–MasterResource has stature as a free-market movement-wide energy blog.

With 415 categories in our index, MasterResource is a lasting research tool, not only a day-to-day contribution to energy scholarship and current political debates. And we have achieved critical mass; ‘Google’ an energy-policy-related term along with MasterResource, and there we usually are!

Our content promises to stand the test of time. Our headlines do not have Stunner or Stunning as does a rival blog selling energy/climate alarmism. Our contributors are wed to reality, not to think-it-and-make-it-is-real and wish-it-and-it-can-happen postmodernism.

Wind Power Niche

One particular niche at MasterResource has been giving voice to the growing, articulate grassroot opposition to industrial wind parks. Such turbines generate a heavy environmental footprint, not only small, unreliable bursts of electricity. Our category, Grassroots Opposition, Windpower, is full of confessionals where former wind supporters saw the light of economic and environmental reality. Here are three from the past year:

* Walter Cudnohufsky: My One-Time, Tacit Support of Industrial Wind: A Confessional

* Michael Morgan: Why I Turned Against ‘Green’ Windpower

* Jen Gilbert: Dear Sierra Club (Canada): I Resign Over Your Anti-Environmental Wind Support  

Other example is Eric Bibler speaking truth to power before the Cape Cod Commission and to Massachusetts authorities.

Regular contributors Jon Boone (see here and here); John Droz Jr (here and here); Tom Stacy (here and here); Sherri Lange (here, here, and here); and the tireless Lisa Linowes have helped make MasterResource a top thirty “green blog” (out of more than 10,000) according to Technorati (#21 as of March 12).

Countless hours spent by Kent Hawkins on calculating the lost reductions from (intermittent) wind power given fossil-plant cycling is another example of a great American (sorry, Kent, you are Canadian) volunteering time to do what is politically incorrect for the U.S. Department of Energy to do. [Read more →]

“Entitlement debt is destroying our great nation. These kinds of taxpayer- and ratepayer-funded giveaways, imposed in the name of being ‘green,’ are simply not sustainable – especially if we want our children and grandchildren to live free and prosper.”

President Obama’s mantra du jour for his 2012 campaign speeches is “all-inclusive” energy. But any business touting this version of “all-inclusive” would be prosecuted for false advertising.

When the President says “all-inclusive,” he means politically correct (PC) “green” energy (wind, solar and bio-fuels), and nothing that actually provides reliable, affordable power – especially not hydrocarbons. Another PC buzzword – “sustainable” – is right out of the United Nation’s Agenda 21 Protocol and the President’s goal of “fundamentally transforming” America.

Increasing pain at the pump and the plug underscores the reality that Mr. Obama’s energy policies are anything but “all-inclusive,” and PC power is anything but sustainable – though they certainly are transforming our country. In fact, if the Keystone XL pipeline’s oil were used to generate electricity, it would provide more energy than all existing U.S. wind and solar installations combined. [Read more →]

Two years ago, I launched Wind Farm Realities, subtitled “Going Where the Evidence Takes Me.” Here’s how I describe my website.

“The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be.”  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

This web site is in the unenviable position of being a messenger of bad news about wind energy. And wind energy was, at least intuitively, so promising!  Most of us know we can’t keep doing what we’re doing – burning through all the fossil fuels we can find – and wind seems to promise a carbon-free, inexhaustible, and benign source that doesn’t send money overseas.

As much as all of us, including myself, would want this rosy picture to be true, the actual evidence so far paints a far different picture.  I understand that many people will resist hearing this bad news, preferring to label me a NIMBY, a Luddite, unscientific, oil-industry-loving, climate-change-denying, jealous – anything to dismiss me.

I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m simply someone who thinks evidence is a better guide to reality than wishful thinking.  And the existing evidence says to me that wind energy has no redeeming value, while its downsides are substantial.

The first indication that I had of the failings of wind energy was when I had the temerity to actually read the references that the wind industry used to “prove” how beneficial and benign wind was.  As an example, if you read AWEA’s “Fact Sheet” on 20% by 2030, it claims a savings of 825 million tons of CO2.  [Read more →]

This letter to Congress was sent by American Energy Alliance, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, Freedom Action, The National Center for Public Policy Research, and Sixty Plus Association. It is reproduced here for its educational value in the general debate over special government favor to politically correct energies.

Dear Senator:

We strongly oppose extending the production tax credit and reviving the 1603 Treasury grant program. The U.S. is risking the energy equivalent of the housing meltdown through a continuation of these policies. Electricity prices are already increasing and these programs will only fuel the increase. Other nations’ economies are already reeling from the much higher electricity prices such sources mean for industry and families.

It is increasingly clear that the intervention of politicians and bureaucrats in the energy sector has had devastating economic consequences and led to embarrassing scandals. Yet the Senate is considering amendments to extend disastrous subsidies for windmills and other form of politically-preferred energy sources….

The PTC was created by the Energy Policy Act of 1992. The wind industry insisted at the time that it needed short-term help from taxpayers and would soon be able to compete on its economic merits. Twenty years later, wind is still uncompetitive, unreliable, and expensive, as reported by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Yet Congress increased subsidies for wind dramatically in recent years, to a record $5 billion in 2010, according to the EIA. [Read more →]

“The stakes here could not be clearer. Economic studies have shown that Congressional inaction on the PTC will kill 37,000 American jobs, shutter plants and cancel billions of dollars in private investment. Congress needs to understand that, with PTC uncertainty, layoffs have already begun and further job losses and even plant closings will accelerate each month as we near expiration in December.”

- Denise Bode, quoted in American Wind Energy Association, “As Wind Manufacturing Job Losses Loom, Bipartisan Wind Extension Drive Continues (February 16, 2012).

Three cheers for market-driven resource reallocation for personal and economic betterment.

Some of us can speak from personal experience. I was part of the 4,000-person layoff from Enron Corporation on Monday December 3, 2001. The economy became a little more efficient that day, as many started getting jobs at other energy companies and elsewhere where consumer demand was stronger.

Such is the ‘creative destruction’ of the market economy where the good replaces the bad, and where the even-better replaces the good.

The windpower industry is entering what could well be the beginning of a death cycle. Industrial wind is increasingly losing its special ratepayer and taxpayer support with democracies in deficit and consumers in search of cost and reliability advantages.

Judging from the ‘help wanted’ signs, the oil and gas industry stands ready to absorb the precious resources that have gone into the ‘Enron’ of energy sources. Some workers will need to be retrained, while others will find a closer integration of skills.

Perhaps even the employees of AWEA can become true environmentalists or libertarian to argue against ethanol and on-grid solar and light bulb mandates to close deficits and increase personal liberty. The pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer movement can always use a few more good women and men! [Read more →]