End the Wind Power Tax Credit
By Alan
Caruba
Like so
much else that involves the absurd “renewable energy” scam—wind, solar power
and ethanol—the public remains largely in the dark about its actual costs. They
come straight out of their pockets in the form of higher costs for electricity
and, in the cast of ethanol, lost mileage and engine damage.
At the end
of this year, unless Congress does something spectacularly stupid—always a
possibility—the Wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) will expire. If extended for
just one more year, it will cost $12 billion. If wind energy was (1) reliable
and (2) economical, one could make a case for it, but it is the very opposite.
Thomas
Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, says “The wind industry claims
a PTC extension will create 37,000 jobs. At a $12 billion price tag, that’s
$327,000 taxpayer dollars for every job. But even with the PTC, the industry
lost 10,000 jobs between 2009 and 2010, a 12% drop.”
Another
way the wind industry has stayed in business, but not in the competitive sense
of other industries, has been renewable energy mandates that require state
utilities to purchase wind powered electricity generation. Many states have
opted out of such mandates as they realized the cost to consumers.
The wind
industry in America, according to Pyle, has cost taxpayers $20 billion over the
past two decades “and, today, the PTC is so lavish that wind producers are
actually paying the electricity grid to take their power, just so they can
collect more taxpayer money.”
All the
economic advances America has made have been the result of the discovery and
utilization of energy generation from oil, natural gas, and coal. If you want
to harm America in the most fundamental way, you would attack these sources of
energy and that is exactly what the Obama administration has been doing since
it took power. For decades coal represented fifty percent of all the
electricity used, but incessant attacks by the Environmental Protection Agency,
using clean air regulations, has reduced this significantly.
The reality is that 94% of all
electricity generated in America comes from traditional sources, coal, natural
gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power. America is home to century’s worth of
inexpensive coal, is the largest producer of natural gas, and invented nuclear
power.
The
absolute least sensible way to generate electricity is wind power, followed
closely by solar power. Since the wind does not blow all the time or with
sufficient ability to turn the blades of the huge turbines, it would seem
obvious that wind is a moronic way to produce electricity, but that has not
kept those reaping taxpayer tax credits and benefitting from mandates for its
use from lining their pockets.
It is a
curiosity of the debate over wind power that its impact on bird and bat species
is rarely, if ever, discussed or reported. In a recent article, Paul Driessen
noted that “The impact of mandated, subsidized and ‘production tax credited’
industrial wind facilities on eagles, whooping cranes, bads, and other value
species is horrendous, ecologically devastating, intolerable—and growing. In
fact, it is infinitely worse than the widely quoted figure of 440,000 birds per
year…the actual USA death toll is 13,000,000 to 39,000,000 birds and bats every
year!”
The expert
I turn to for information about wind power is John Droz, Jr., a physicist and a
leading activist against its use whose website is worth visiting.
Wind power
doesn’t meet any of the major criteria for the generation of electricity. Droz points
out that it only produces about 30% of the power it allegedly can or should
produce. This is because “it takes over one thousand times the amount of land
for wind power” that a single nuclear power plant produces. Moreover, that land
has to be located far from the cities and suburbs that need to access its
power.
Is wind
power reliable or even predictable? Compared to traditional power generators,
it doesn’t come close compared to the standards set for them. Indeed, “when
power is really needed,” notes Droz, such as hot summer afternoons, “wind is
usually on vacation.” It most certainly cannot be depended upon to dispatch
power to the grid on demand, nor can it supply power reliably to meet a 24/7
demand.
Along with
the Wind Protection Tax Credit, the industry is subsidized far more than any
conventional power source, Cost per megawatt-hour, according to the U.S. Energy
Information Agency, is subsidized to the tune of $23 per megawatt-hour. Compare
that with coal that receives 44 cents! Natural gas at 25 cents! Hydroelectric
at 67 cents, and nuclear power at $1.59.
The
advocates of wind power are the same charlatans who keep shouting about carbon
dioxide (CO2) as the cause of global warming—and now “climate change—when CO2
plays no role whatever in causing or changing the climate. It is also touted as
being environmentally beneficial, but tell that to the thousands of bird and
bat species the wind turbines kill every year.
Allowing
the PTC to expire at the end of the year will not mark the end of wind power,
but it will surely make it even less competitive in the years ahead and, like
other nations that bought into this fairy tale, those dependent on it are going
to suffer some dire consequences, particularly as the current cooling cycle the
Earth has been in for the last sixteen years deepens.
© Alan
Caruba, 2012
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