Father of Green Communities Act, Convicted Under the RICO Act! Who’s Next?

April 28, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Falmouth Wind Turbines – RICO Act

Prior to Wind Turbine Installations Falmouth had the Octave Band Data / Sound performance for the V82 turbine

Falmouth Wind Turbines & RICO Act

Did the Town of Falmouth violate the RICO Act ? They all knew the turbines would break state noise laws !

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)
Noise Control Regulation 310 CMR 7.10

310 CMR 7.10 Noise
(1) No person owning, leasing, or controlling a source of sound shall willfully, negligently, or through failure to provide necessary equipment, service, or maintenance or to take necessary precautions cause, suffer, allow, or permit unnecessary emissions from said source of sound that may cause noise.

Prior to the installations of the Falmouth wind turbines it appears Vestas Wind Company forewarned the Town of Falmouth, Town of Falmouth contract engineers and construction contractors. The manufacturer ( Vestas )also needs confirmation that the Town of

Falmouth understands they are fully responsible for the site selection of the turbine and bear all responsibilities to address any mitigation needs of the neighbors.

The turbines operated full time until May of 2012. State officials shut down the wind turbine in Falmouth after measurements showed the machine generating more than 10 decibels above ordinary background noise.

The turbines operate 12 hours a day during daylight now and are shut off on Sunday

Passed in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a federal law designed to combat organized crime in the United States. It allows prosecution and civil penalties for racketeering activity performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.

To convict a defendant under RICO, the government must prove that the defendant engaged in two or more instances of racketeering activity and that the defendant directly invested in, maintained an interest in, or participated in a criminal enterprise affecting interstate or foreign commerce.

Political Corruption

Politicians :
. UNITED STATES V. CIANCI
Providence Rhode Island
For twenty-one years, from 1975-1984 and from 1991-2002, Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci was the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.

Ultimately, Cianci was only convicted of one RICO conspiracy count.
The First Circuit notes—for a RICO conspiracy conviction, a defendant simply “must intend to further an endeavor which, if completed, would satisfy all of the elements of a substantive criminal offense, but it suffices that he adopted the goal of furthering or facilitating the criminal endeavor.”

Buddy Cianci was therefore found guilty of a §1962(d) RICO conspiracy violation and sentenced to five years and four months in prison.

Falmouth noise letter recently released through a Freedom of Information Request

August 3, 2010
Mr. Gerald Potamis
WasteWater Superintendent
Town of Falmouth Public Works
59 Town Hall Square
Falmouth, MA 02540

RE: Falmouth WWTF Wind Energy Facility II “Wind II”, Falmouth, MA
Contract No. #3297

Dear Mr. Potamis,

Due to the sound concerns regarding the first wind turbine installed at the wastewater treatment facility, the manufacturer of the turbines, Vestas, is keen for the Town of Falmouth to understand the possible noise and other risks associated with the installation of the second wind turbine.

The Town has previously been provided with the Octave Band Data / Sound performance for the V82 turbine. This shows that the turbine normally operates at 103.2dB but the manufacturer has also stated that it may produce up to 110dB under certain circumstances. These measurements are based on IEC standards for sound measurement which is calculated at a height of 10m above of the base of the turbine.

We understand that a sound study is being performed to determine what, if any, Impacts the second turbine will have to the nearest residences. Please be advised that should noise concerns arise with this turbine, the only option to mitigate normal operating sound from the V82 is to shut down the machine at certain wind speeds and directions. Naturally this would detrimentally affect power production.

The manufacturer also needs confirmation that the Town of Falmouth understands they are fully responsible for the site selection of the turbine and bear all responsibilities to address any mitigation needs of the neighbors.

Finally, the manufacturer has raised the possibility of ice throw concerns. Since Route 28 is relatively close to the turbine, precautions should be taken in weather that may cause icing.

To date on this project we have been unable to move forward with signing the contract with Vestas. The inability to release the turbine for shipment to the project site has caused significant [SIC] delays in our project schedule. In order to move forward the manufacturer requires your understanding and acknowledgement of these risks. We kindly request for this acknowledgement to be sent to us by August 4, 2010, as we have scheduled a coordination meeting with Vestas to discuss the project schedule and steps forward for completion of the project.

Please sign in the space provided below to indicate your understanding and acknowledgement of this letter. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me.

Sincerely,

(Bruce Mabbott’s signature)
_____________________
Bruce Mabbott Gerald Potamis
Project Manager Town of Falmouth

CC: Sumul Shah, Lumus Construction, Inc.
(Town of Falmouth’s Wind-1 and Wind-2 Construction contractor)

Stephen Wiehe, Weston & Sampson
(Town of Falmouth’s contract engineers)

Brian Hopkins, Vestas
(Wind-1, Wind-2’s turbine manufacturer, and also Webb/NOTUS turbine)

The Truth About Wealth Redistribution, & the Unaffordable, Renewables Scam!

April 27, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Want to Help the Poorest? Then It’s Time to Ditch Wind Power

April 27, 2015 by stopthesethings

The only reason that Western economies have entertained the infantile nonsense of wind power, is that the rich world can afford (at least in the short term) to throw $billions in subsidies at a wholly weather dependent “system”, that will never stump up as an “alternative”, unless your starting point is sitting freezing (or boiling) in the dark; and you’re happy with that as your status quo (see our post here).

Some, however, might call backing wind power a form of wanton waste, aimed at satisfying the political vanity of the naive and gullible.

Then there’s the moral bankruptcy of a policy that’s aimed at wind power producers to (notionally) add more electricity to the system, notwithstanding that, in Australia, there is NO shortage of power – what there is a shortage of, however, is affordable power; and wind power will never provide that (see our post here).

Australia’s wind industry depends entirely on the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target – which has already transferred $9 billion, and is set up to transfer $50 billion more, from power consumers (in the form of the REC Tax on retail power bills) to subsidise wind power outfits, at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable who, as the policy bites in the next 2 years and beyond, will simply be denied access to power (see our post here).

When the concept of directing $50 billion worth of Australian taxes springs to mind, it doesn’t take long to think of groups within Australia that could easily be considered more worthy recipients, than foreign owned wind power outfits, backed by Union Super Funds.

STT’s first picks would be Aboriginal health and education; where standards in many regional and remote communities are positively third world. A fraction of what the wind industry is clamouring to pocket by keeping the LRET alive would, if well-managed, go a long way to giving a lot of under-privileged Australians an opportunity to improve their lot; and the lives of their children. Healthy kids have a better chance of learning; and educated kids have a better chance, all round.

But Aboriginal health and education hardly rates a mention from inner city “greens” – instead, their present obsession is “wonderful wind power” and ‘saving’ the RET.

Their worship of wind turbines, as some kind of Divine gift from the wind Gods, is a form of mania, akin to a deluded, religious fanaticism.

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The mania extends to pumping up the fiction that the world can obtain 100% of its electricity needs from wind and solar power.

If left unchallenged, the end result of the ‘Greens’ ludicrous push for 100% ‘renewables’, will be to prevent the poorest and most vulnerable in developed economies from ever affording power again; and to simply deny power to under-developed economies and the poorest on the planet, altogether.

Steadily, though, the fiction that developing Nations can pull themselves out of poverty using insanely expensive and utterly unreliable wind power is being challenged. Here’s The New York times, throwing down the gauntlet.

A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development
The New York Times
Eduardo Porter
14 April 2015

The average citizen of Nepal consumes about 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year. Cambodians make do with 160. Bangladeshis are better off, consuming, on average, 260.

Then there is the fridge in your kitchen. A typical 20-cubic-foot refrigerator — Energy Star-certified, to fit our environmentally conscious times — runs through 300 to 600 kilowatt-hours a year.

American diplomats are upset that dozens of countries — including Nepal, Cambodia and Bangladesh — have flocked to join China’s newinfrastructure investment bank, a potential rival to the World Bank and other financial institutions backed by the United States.

The reason for the defiance is not hard to find: The West’s environmental priorities are blocking their access to energy.

A typical American consumes, on average, about 13,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. The citizens of poor countries — including Nepalis, Cambodians and Bangladeshis — may not aspire to that level of use, which includes a great deal of waste. But they would appreciate assistance from developed nations, and the financial institutions they control, to build up the kind of energy infrastructure that could deliver the comfort and abundance that Americans and Europeans enjoy.

Too often, the United States and its allies have said no.

The United States relies on coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear power for about 95 percent of its electricity, said Todd Moss, from the Center for Global Development. “Yet we place major restrictions on financing all four of these sources of power overseas.”

This conflict is not merely playing out in the strategic maneuvering of the United States and China as they engage in a struggle for influence on the global stage.

Of far greater consequence is the way the West’s environmental agenda undermines the very goals it professes to achieve and threatens to advance devastating climate change rather than retard it.

“It is about pragmatism, about trade-offs,” said Barry Brook, professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania in Australia. “Most societies will not follow low-energy, low-development paths, regardless of whether they work or not to protect the environment.”

If billions of impoverished humans are not offered a shot at genuine development, the environment will not be saved. And that requires not just help in financing low-carbon energy sources, but also a lot of new energy, period. Offering a solar panel for every thatched roof is not going to cut it.

“We shouldn’t be talking about 10 villages that got power for a light bulb,” said Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University in India who was among the leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

“What we should be talking about,” she said, “is how the village got a power connection for a cold storage facility or an industrial park.”

Changing the conversation will not be easy. Our world of seven billion people — expected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century — will require an entirely different environmental paradigm.

On Tuesday, a group of scholars involved in the environmental debate, including Professor Roy and Professor Brook, Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., issued what they are calling the “Eco-modernist Manifesto.”

The “eco-modernists” propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of “sustainable development,” supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using nature more intensively.

“Natural systems will not, as a general rule, be protected or enhanced by the expansion of humankind’s dependence upon them for sustenance and well-being,” they wrote.

To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than “intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world.”

As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature “by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it.”

This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world’s surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much lessland and water.

As the manifesto notes, as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity wassupposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half.

“If we want the developing world to reach even half our level of development we can’t do it without strategies to intensify production,” said Harvard’s David Keith, a signer of the new manifesto.

The eminent Australian conservationist William Laurance, who is not involved with the eco-modernists, put it this way, “We need to intensify agriculture in places that we have already developed rather than develop new places,” he said. “What is happening today is much more chaotic.”

Development would allow people in the world’s poorest countries to move into cities — as they did decades ago in rich nations — and get better educations and jobs. Urban living would accelerate demographic transitions, lowering infant mortality rates and allowing fertility rates to decline, taking further pressure off the planet.

“By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends,” the manifesto argues.

This, whether we like it or not, would require lots of energy. Windmills or biofuels would put large swaths of the earth’s surface in the service of energy production, so they have only limited usefulness. Solar panels andnuclear plants, by contrast, could eventually provide carbon-free energy on a very large scale.

The new strategy, of course, presents big challenges. Notably, it requires improving the safety of nuclear reactors and bringing down their price. Solar energy at scale requires new energy storage technologies.

“Decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutions alongside those changes,” says the manifesto.

Until they are developed, poor countries will require access to other forms of energy — including hydroelectric power from dams, natural gas, perhaps even coal.

“There are enormous energy demands,” Professor DeFries noted. “It will be some time before we can fulfill them with wind and solar energy. It is only realistic that there will be a lot of coal and gas along the way.”

For all the environment-related objections one could pose to these paths, the alternative seems indefensible: Let the poor of the world burn dung and wood, further degrading the world’s forests. Or put solar panels on their huts so they can recharge their cellphones.

“Sustainable development” has been around for over a quarter century, since the United Nations’ Bruntland Commission proposed it in 1987.

Even then, it acknowledged its energy problem. “A safe and sustainable energy pathway is crucial to sustainable development,” it stated. “We have not yet found it.”

A quarter of a century on, the discourse has changed little. Today, the International Energy Agency states that it is within our grasp to provide modern energy access to everyone. What does it mean? Five hundred kilowatt-hours per year to urban households and 250 for rural ones.

Maybe enough to power a fridge.
The New York Times

When it Comes to Energy, We Need SCIENCE, not Symbolism!

April 27, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Science, not symbolism

Glen Brand’s recent Earth Day OpEd and his passionate embrace of renewables fails to address the big problems associated with grid-scale wind and solar. Neither are dispatchable on demand, and their intermittent energy production cannot be stored, which means traditional power plants must be kept running to back them up.

Grid-scale solar installations don’t take into consideration the massive amounts of heat being generated by acres of black panels blanketing the earth, heat intense enough to incinerate birds flying overhead. The sprawling industrial wind “farms” being constructed along Maine’s mountains and ridge lines do not address the ecological and environmental impacts of blasting and road building at high elevations, clear cutting of forests, spraying of herbicides, building of large transmission corridors from remote mountain locations and the loss of critical habitat for our winged friends.

Three hundred miles of 500-foot tall blinking turbines stretching from north to south will impact 12,000 square miles of scenic viewsheds, which represent priceless economic assets in a state that relies on tourism as its biggest industry. Government-subsidized, grid-scale wind and solar do not pass the real cost-benefit analysis, and worse they siphon much needed funds away from finding truly clean solutions for a power-hungry planet.

Our energy policies should be based on science, not symbolism.

Penelope Gray

Registered Maine Master Guide

Freeport

Wind is Novelty Energy. Too much Pain, For Far Too Little Gain!

April 24, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Brits Waking Up to the Insane Cost of its Wind Power Disaster

April 24, 2015 by stopthesethings

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Green targets ‘cost £214 a year’: Report says rush for renewable energy has been ‘most expensive policy disaster in modern British history’
Jack Doyle
Daily Mail
18 March 2015

Shifting to wind and solar power has increased costs to consumers
Ditching green energy targets would save households £214 a year
Report into renewable energy carried out by The Centre for Policy Studies
Found the rush to go green has been the ‘most expensive policy disaster’
Say no British Government has carried out analysis of costs vs benefits
Annual cost of renewable target is said to be a staggering £9 billion

Ditching green energy targets would save every household in Britain around £214 a year, a report reveals today.

The Centre for Policy Studies paper concludes that the rush for renewable energy has been the ‘most expensive policy disaster in modern British history’.

Shifting to wind and solar power have hugely increased costs to consumers, while creating an energy supply that is ‘intermittent’.

As a result, huge additional investment has been required in backup capacity to cover for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

And billions more have been spent to connect remote wind farms to the national grid.

Author Rupert Darwall concludes that, astonishingly, no British government has conducted a rigorous analysis of the costs and benefits of the renewables target which was first negotiated by Tony Blair at the European Council in 2007.

The Government is committed to providing 15 per cent of its energy from renewable power by 2020.

Mr Darwall, the author of The Age of Global Warming, concludes that the annual costs of the renewables target is a staggering £9billion.

Switching back to a free market in power would save households around £214 a year, assuming that gas replaces renewables, he says.

The report says: ‘Energy policy represents the biggest expansion of state power since the nationalisations of the 1940s and 1950s. It is on course to be the most expensive domestic policy disaster in modern British history.

‘By committing the nation to high, cost, unreliable renewable energy, its consequences will be felt for decades.’

‘In addition to their higher plant-level costs, renewables require massive amounts of extra generating capacity to provide cover for intermittent generation when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.’

The report concludes that the costs of ‘intermittent renewables’ have been ‘massively understated’.

As a result, ‘massively subsidiesed wind and solar capacity floods the market with near random amounts of zero marginal cost electricity.’

‘To keep the lights on, everything ends up requiring subsidies, turning what was once a profitable sector into the energy equivalent of the Common Agricultural Policy.’

The cost of the national grid has nearly trebled as a result of connecting to remote wind farms, he says. More solar and wind means Britain is having to more than double its overall capacity, because additional sources are needed when wind isn’t working.

Without renewable energy, the UK would need 22GW of new capacity to replace old coal and nuclear stations, but as a result of renewable energy, an additional 50GW is required, the report says.

Abandoning renewables and going back to a market system would save around £6billion a year, or around £214 for every household, he says.

But Professor Catherine Mitchell, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Exeter said the report ‘downplays climate change as a problem’.

She said: ‘What is needed is an electricity market that is constructed to best integrate renewable energy and energy efficiency for the benefit of customers, the environment and security.’

Last month, Energy Secretary Ed Davey announced £4billion in new energy deals for wind and solar schemes. It means a guarantee for some 27 new renewable energy projects that they can sell their power at a fixed price until 2040. The subsidised schemes include 15 onshore wind farms, five solar arrays, two offshore wind programmes and five waste conversion plants.

It will be paid for by householders through their electricity bills with a subsidy added to the basic cost of electricity.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: ‘We are dealing with a legacy of underinvestment to safeguard people’s electricity supplies now and in the years ahead.

‘The Government’s Electricity Market Reforms are designed to attract up to £100 billion of capital investment that we will need in the sector over the next decade. By creating the world’s first low carbon electricity market, we are going green at the lowest cost, and attracting tens of billions of pounds of infrastructure investment, creating huge numbers of green jobs.’
Daily Mail

Rupert Darwall’s brilliant, but sobering, analysis is covered in full here:

How Wind Power Subsidies Destroy Both Electricity Markets & Economies

Even Germany is Seeing Reality, and Coming to it’s Senses About “Novelty Energy”…

April 23, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

German’s Top Daily – Bild – says Time to Chop Massive Subsidies for Wind Power

April 23, 2015 by stopthesethings

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The Germans went into wind power harder and faster than anyone else – and the cost of doing so is catching up with a vengeance. The subsidies have been colossal, the impacts on the electricity market chaotic and – contrary to the environmental purpose of the policy – CO2 emissions are rising fast: if “saving” the planet is – as we are repeatedly told – all about reducing man-made emissions of an odourless, colourless, naturally occurring trace gas, essential for all life on earth – then German energy/environmental policy has manifestly failed (see our post here).

Some 800,000 German homes have been disconnected from the grid – victims of what is euphemistically called “fuel poverty”. In response, Germans have picked up their axes and have headed to their forests in order to improve their sense of energy security – although foresters apparently take the view that this self-help measure is nothing more than blatant timber theft (see our post here).

German manufacturers – and other energy intensive industries – faced with escalating power bills are packing up and heading to the USA – where power prices are 1/3 of Germany’s (see our posts here and hereand here). And the “green” dream of creating thousands of jobs in the wind industry has to turned out to be just that: a dream (see our post here).

By piling into wind power without ever having thought through the costs, let alone the “benefits”, of trying to rely on a wholly weather dependent power generation source, the Germans are left with a generation system on the brink of total collapse, as picked up by The Daily Caller.

Germany’s On The Brink Of An Energy Crisis
The Daily Caller
Michael Bastasch
13 April 2015

After years of subsidizing green energy production, Germany may be on the brink of an imminent “energy crisis,” reports German Mittelstand News.

Some 39 power plants across the country “could be decommissioned later this year” which could “jeopardize the security of supply,” precipitating a huge energy crisis in the coming years as more plants are shuttered, according to the German Association of Energy and Water Industries — the country’s main utilities lobby.

“Every second power plant planned in Germany is about to fold,” Mittelstand News reports. “The willingness to invest is decreasing rapidly as even the most efficient gas-fired power plants can no longer be operated profitably.”

Problems will get even worse when Germany’s last nuclear power plant is retired in 2022, reports Mittelstand News. For years, the government has subsidized solar and wind energy through energy taxes that have dramatically jacked up electricity rates.

But at the same time, the flood of solar and wind energy on the grid has caused wholesale electricity prices to collapse — all while retail rates have skyrocketed. But the collapse in wholesale prices are cutting into the profitability of coal and gas plant operators that don’t get the generous subsidies that green energy does.

This problem was highlighted by a 2014 report by the Switzerland-based FAA Financial Advisory AG. The group found Germany’s green energy revolution is having “profound effects on wholesale electricity markets that could ultimately result in a deterioration of the country’s reliability.”

What’s happening is that green energy sources are given priority on the grid when meeting power demand, therefore setting the marginal price of electricity being produced — which is very low because they have no fuel costs. The prioritization of green energy has depressed wholesale prices and means that coal and gas power can’t recover their full costs.

This normally wouldn’t be a problem in a free, competitive market, but subsidies for green energy means more coal and gas plants are needed for back-up. These, plants, however, are having trouble finding investors willing to lose money because they can’t make money selling electricity.

“There are fewer hours in which the conventional power plants earn more than the marginal cost since they run fewer hours than originally planned and, in many cases, provide back-up power only,” FAA Financial noted. “Generators’ financial difficulties have already translated into lower stock prices and credit ratings.”

The problem has gotten so bad that utilities are asking the government to bail them out. Reduced profitability means less investment in the power sector, which the utilities lobby says could create problems down the road if nothing is done to prop up coal and gas plants.

“If politicians carry on as they do now then there will be no new, modern power stations,” utilities lobby chief Hildegard Mueller told Reuters. “There are no incentives whatsoever for investments, despite politicians emphasizing all the time that they aim to change this.”

German utilities already get payments for not producing power when green energy output is peaking — generally in the middle of the day because of solar energy.

Over the last decade, Germany’s embarked on a costly $412 billion crusade to subsidize green energy production and reduce carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2050. In that time green energy production has boomed from 4.3 percent of total energy consumption in 1990 to 23.5 percent in 2012.

But Germany’s green energy revolution is costing German residents dearly. Retail electricity rates have more than doubled in the last decade due to ever-growing taxes to support green energy use. German politicians have been pressured to reform the system, but it’s still expected to cost consumers more and more every year.

Consumer energy bills have gotten to the point where electricity in the country has been called a “luxury good” by major media outlets.

In recent years, Germany has expanded coal power, but has rejected calls to open up the country to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to boost natural gas production. Even so, new coal plants in Germany could be closed down if trends continue.
The Daily Caller

The Germans are fast waking up the unassailable fact that wind power is not only insanely expensive, it’s utterly meaningless as a power source:

German Wind Power Goes Completely AWOL 11 Times in the Last 80 Days

With hostility from power punters escalating, Germany’s top daily, Bild has called for an end to the subsidies that have fuelled its great wind power fraud: the original in German is available here; and the English translation – courtesy of NoTricksZone – appears below.

Germany’s Leading Daily Calls For An End To Green Energy Subsidies! Calls Green Promises “A Fairy Tale”
NoTricksZone
Pierre Gosselin
3 April 2015

Germany’s leading daily in terms of circulation Bild recently featured an op-ed piece that harshly criticizes Germany’s Energiewende (transition to renewable energies).

Clearly the Energiewende is not even coming close to living up to what is was originally billed to deliver.

Despite adding more than 70 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity that will cost consumers some $200 billion, German CO2 emissions have not decreased to speak of. Coal-fired power has actually risen.

In summary German electricity prices have skyrocketed and poor consumers are being hit hard. Energy-intensive industries are off-shoring operations – and jobs!

A number of experts are calling the Energiewende the greatest wealth redistribution from poor to rich scheme in Germany’s history as wealthy property owners cash in with subsidized zero-risk wind and solar installations. The poor consumers are forced to cough up the money.

“Enough with green power!”

So it’s little wonder that major German media outlets are beginning to express doubts. Bild features an opinion piece titled: “Enough with green power!”

The popular German daily calls the promises of cheap power from wind and sun “a fairy tale”. It writes:

Indeed the truth is: The price of power continues to climb. Just in the past five years the power price exploded 29 percent.

The reason is simple: In the energy market, central planning rules and not the free market.”

Disfigured market

Today there is so much installed capacity, Bild writes, that “on days with lots of sunshine and wind, the green power has to be sold to foreign countries” – even if they don’t need it. When that happens the highly subsidized power gets sold at negative prices. The result? Huge losses for power companies. This is how disfigured the electric power market has become.

In summary Bild concludes that the price of power is much more expensive than it needs to be and that it is a product that needs to remain affordable. Germany’s energy policy is on the wrong path.

Unfortunately there are no signs things will change anytime soon in Germany, which now has the world’s second highest electricity prices in the world after Denmark.
No Tricks Zone

In Australia, the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers hold the Germans up as wind power “super-models”, touting its wind-rush as the perfect path to prosperity, millions of groovy “green” jobs and a CO2 free future (best warn every living thing on Earth if that ever looks likely).

But, as with every “model” or “example”, there are good ones, and bad ones.

When Germany’s top newspaper is clamoring for an end to its wind powered energy debacle, it’s pretty clear we’re talking about a mighty poor “model”; and an “example” to be avoided at all costs.

People Worldwide are Waking Up to the Reality of the Wind Scam!

April 21, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Top US Energy Economist Takes the Scalpel to the Great Wind Power Fraud

April 21, 2015 by stopthesethings

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One of the great mysteries behind the lunacy that is the great wind power fraud is how and why so many governments launched into mandating massive and endless subsidies (filched from unwitting power consumers and/or taxpayers) for an utterly meaningless power generation source – WITHOUT ever having carried out a cost/benefit analysis?

You know, the kind of analysis that economists put together on a daily basis; and which are used to give the thumbs up (or down) to government policies BEFORE they’re set rolling like unstoppable locomotives; especially where, as here, they involve massive streams of corporate welfare.

****

In a better late than never move, economists the world over are now taking the scalpel to the wind industry and, especially, its wilder claims about being “competitive” with conventional generation sources. Of course, if there was a shred of truth in that ripping yarn, the wind industry and its parasites wouldn’t need to spend every waking hour on the rent-seeker trail; bleating about the need for Renewable Energy Targets (written in stone), and the need to keep the subsidy gravy train rolling, interminably.

As the myth, fantasy and fallacy gets sliced away to reveal the true costs of wind power, the number crunchers are finding that wind power simply doesn’t measure up, on any score. Here’s Newsweek with one such dissection.

What’s the True Cost of Wind Power?
Newsweek
Randy Simmons
11 April 2015

As consumers, we pay for electricity twice: once through our monthly electricity bill and a second time through taxes that finance massive subsidies for inefficient wind and other energy producers.

Most cost estimates for wind power disregard the heavy burden of these subsidies on US taxpayers. But if Americans realized the full cost of generating energy from wind power, they would be less willing to foot the bill – because it’s more than most people think.

Over the past 35 years, wind energy – which supplied just 4.4% of US electricity in 2014 – has received US$30 billion in federal subsidies and grants. These subsidies shield people from the uncomfortable truth of just how much wind power actually costs and transfer money from average taxpayers to wealthy wind farm owners, many of which are units of foreign companies.

Financial advisory firm Lazard puts the cost of generating a megawatt-hour of electricity from wind at a range of $37 to $81. In reality, the true price tag is significantly higher.

This represents a waste of resources that could be better spent by taxpayers themselves. Even the supposed environmental gains of relying more on wind power are dubious because of its unreliability – it doesn’t always blow – meaning a stable backup power source must always be online to take over during periods of calm.

But at the same time, the subsidies make the US energy infrastructure more tenuous because the artificially cheap electricity prices push more reliable producers – including those needed as backup – out of the market. As we rely more on wind for our power and its inherent unreliability, the risk of blackouts grows. If that happens, the costs will really soar.

Many government agencies are in the wind business these days. GAO

Where the subsidies go

Many people may be familiar with Warren Buffet’s claim that federal policies are the only reason to build wind farms in the US, but few realize how many of the companies that benefit most are foreign. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University found that, as of 2010, 84% of total clean-energy grants awarded by the federal government went to foreign-owned wind companies.

More generally, the beneficiaries of federal renewable energy policies tend to be large companies, not individual taxpayers or small businesses. The top five recipients of federal grants and tax credits since 2000 are: Iberdrola, NextEra Energy, NRG Energy, Southern Company and Summit Power, all of which have received more than $1 billion in federal benefits.

Iberdrola Renewables alone, a unit of a Spanish utility, has collected $2.2 billion in federal grants and allocated tax credits over the past 15 years. That’s equivalent to about 6.7% of the parent company’s 2014 revenue of $33 billion (in current US dollars).

President Obama’s proposed 2016 budget would permanently extend the biggest federal subsidy for wind power, the Production Tax Credit (PTC), ensuring that large foreign companies continue to reap most of the taxpayer-funded benefits for wind. The PTC is a federal subsidy that pays wind farm owners $23 per megawatt-hour through the first ten years of a turbine’s operation. The credit expired at the end of 2013, but Congress extended it so that all projects under construction by the end of 2014 are eligible.

In all, Congress has enacted 82 policies, overseen by nine different agencies, to support wind power.

I explained in December why Congress shouldn’t revive the PTC, which expired at the end of 2014. In this article, I’m adding up the true cost of wind power in the US, including the impact of the PTC and other subsidies and mandates. It’s part of a study I’m doing of other energy sources including solar, natural gas, and coal to determine how much each one actually cost us when all factors are considered.

As Warren Buffett has said, there wouldn’t be a wind industry without the PTC. UCS, DOE, AWEA

Tallying the true costs of wind

Depending on which factors are included, estimates for the cost of wind power vary wildly. Lazard claims the cost of wind power ranges from $37 to $81 per megawatt-hour, while Michael Giberson at the Center for Energy Commerce at Texas Tech University suggests it’s closer to $149. Our analysis in an upcoming report explores this wide gap in cost estimates, finding that most studies underestimate the genuine cost of wind because they overlook key factors.

All estimates for wind power include the cost of purchasing capital and paying for operations and maintenance (O&M) of wind turbines. For the studies we examined, capital costs ranged from $48 to $88 per megawatt-hour, while O&M costs ranged from $9.8 to $21 per megawatt-hour.

Many estimates, however, don’t include costs related to the inherent unreliability of wind power and government subsidies and mandates. Since we can’t ensure the wind always blows, or how strongly, coal and natural gas plants must be kept on as backup to compensate when it’s calm. This is known as baseload cycling, and its cost ranges from $2 to $23 per megawatt-hour.

This also reduces the environmental friendliness of wind power. Because a coal-fired or natural gas power plant must be kept online in case there’s no wind, two plants are running to do the job of one. These plants create carbon emissions, reducing the environmental benefits of wind. The amount by which emissions reductions are offset by baseload cycling ranges from 20% to 50%, according to a modeling study by two professors at Carnegie Mellon University.

While the backup plants are necessary to ensure the grid’s reliability, their ability to operate is threatened by wind subsidies. The federal dollars encourage wind farm owners to produce power even when prices are low, flooding the market with cheap electricity. That pushes prices down even further and makes it harder for more reliable producers, such as nuclear plants, that don’t get hefty subsidies to stay in business.

For example, the Kewaunee Nuclear Plant in Wisconsin and the Yankee Nuclear Plant in Vermont both switched off their reactors in 2013. Dominion Energy, which owned both plants, blamed the artificially low prices caused by the PTC as one of the reasons for the shutdown.

As more reliable sources drop off and wind power takes their place, consumers are left with an electrical infrastructure that is less reliable and less capable of meeting demand.

Lost in transmission

Another factor often overlooked is the extra cost of transmission. Many of America’s wind-rich areas are remote and the turbines are often planted in open fields, far from major cities. That means new transmission lines must be built to carry electricity to consumers. The cost of building new transmission lines ranges from $15 to $27 per megawatt-hour.

In 2013, Texas completed its Competitive Renewable Energy Zone project, adding over 3,600 miles of transmission lines to remote wind farms, costing state taxpayers $7 billion.

Although transmission infrastructure may be considered a fixed cost that will reduce future transmission costs for wind power, these costs will likely remain important. Today’s wind farms are built in areas with prime wind resources. If we continue to subsidize wind power, producers will eventually expand to sub-prime locations that may be even further from population centers. This would feed demand for additional transmission projects to transport electricity from remote wind farms to cities.

The final bill comes to…

Finally, federal subsidies and state mandates also add significantly to the cost, even as many estimates claim these incentives actually reduce the cost of wind energy. In fact, they add to it as American taxpayers are forced to foot the bill. According to Giberson, federal and state policiesadd an average of $23 per megawatt-hour to the cost of wind power.

That includes the impact of state mandates, which end up increasing the cost of electricity on consumer power bills. California is one of the most aggressive in pushing so-called Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), requiring the state to consume 33% of its electricity from renewables by 2020. Overall electricity prices in states with RPS are 38% higher than those without, according to the Institute for Energy Research, a non-profit research group that promotes free markets.

The best estimate available for the total cost of wind power is $149 per megawatt-hour, taken from Giberson’s 2013 report.

It is difficult to quantify some factors of the cost of wind power, such as the cost of state policies. Giberson’s estimate, however, includes the most relevant factors in attempting to measure the true cost of producing electricity from wind power. In future reports, Strata will explore the true cost of producing electricity from solar, coal, and natural gas. Until those reports are completed, it is difficult to accurately compare the true cost of wind to other technologies, as true cost studies have not yet been completed.

Blowing in the wind

The high costs of federal subsidies and state mandates for wind power have not paid off for the American public. According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, wind energy receives a higher percentage of federal subsidies than any other type of energy while generating a very small percentage of the nation’s electricity.

In 2010 the wind energy sector received 42% of total federal subsidies while producing only 2% of the nation’s total electricity. By comparison, coal receives 10% of all subsidies and generates 45% and nuclear is about even at about 20%.

Wind gobbles up the largest share of subsidies yet produces little power. EIA

But policymakers at the federal and state level, unfortunately, have decided that the American people will have renewable energy, no matter how high the costs. As a result, taxpayers will be stuck paying the cost of subsidies to wealthy wind producers.

Meanwhile, electricity consumers will be forced to purchase the more expensive power that results from state-level mandates for renewable energy production. Although such policies may be well intended, the real results will be limited freedom, reduced prosperity and an increasingly unreliable power supply.

Randy Simmons is professor of political economy at Utah State University. Megan Hansen, a Strata policy analyst, co-authored this article, which first appeared on The Conversation. Full disclosure: Randy Simmons receives funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (grant has been completed and there is no current funding) and Strata, a 501 (c)3 non-profit organization. Megan Hansen, a Strata policy analyst, co-authored this article.

Newsweek

Climate Change Fraud is Much Bigger Than it Seems!

April 17, 2015April 17, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

The Great Wind Power Fraud: Just the Tip of the Climate Change Hysteria Spending Iceberg

April 17, 2015 by stopthesethings

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The tip of the climate spending iceberg
CFACT
Paul Driessen
31 March 2015

Lockheed Martin, a recent Washington Post article notes, is getting into renewable energy, nuclear fusion, “sustainability” and even fish farming projects, to augment its reduced defense profits. The company plans to forge new ties with Defense Department and other Obama initiatives, based on a shared belief in manmade climate change as a critical security and planetary threat.

It is charging ahead where other defense contractors have failed, confident that its expertise, lobbying skills and “socially responsible” commitment to preventing climate chaos will land it plentiful contracts and subsidies.

As with its polar counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg is invisible to most citizens, businessmen and politicians. The Lockheed action is the mere tip of the icy mountaintop.

The multi-billion-dollar agenda reflects the Obama Administration’s commitment to using climate change to radically transform America. It reflects a determination to make the climate crisis industry so enormous that no one will be able to tear it down, even as computer models and disaster claims become less and less credible – and even if Republicans control Congress and the White House after 2016. Lockheed is merely the latest in a long list of regulators, researchers, universities, businesses, manufacturers, pressure groups, journalists and politicians with such strong monetary, reputational and authority interests in alarmism that they will defend its tenets and largesse tooth and nail.

Above all, it reflects a conviction that alarmists have a right to control our energy use, lives, livelihoods and living standards, with no transparency and no accountability for mistakes they make or damage they inflict on disfavored industries and families.

And they are pursuing this agenda despite global warming again beingdead last in the latest Gallup poll of 15 issues of greatest concern to Americans: only 25% say they worry about it “a great deal,” despite steady hysteria; 24% are “not at all” worried about the climate. By comparison, 46% percent worry a great deal about the size and power of the federal government.

But Climate Crisis, Inc. is using our tax and consumer dollars to advance six simultaneous strategies.

1) Climate research. The US government spends $2.5 billion per year on research that focuses on carbon dioxide, ignores powerful natural forces that have always driven climate change, and generates numerous reports and press releases warning of record high temperatures, melting icecaps, rising seas, stronger storms, more droughts and other “unprecedented” crises. The claims are erroneous and deceitful.

They are consistently contradicted by actual climate and weather records, and so alarmists increasingly emphasize computer models that reinvent and substitute for reality. Penn State modeler Michael Mann has collected millions for headline-grabbing work like his latest assertion that the Gulf Stream is slowing – contrary to 20 years of actual measurements that show no change. Former NASA astronomer James Hansen received a questionable $250,000 Heinz Award from Secretary of State John Kerry’s wife, for his climate crisis and anti-coal advocacy. Al Gore and350.org also rake in millions. Alarmist scientists and institutions seek billions more, while virtually no government money goes to research into natural forces.

2) Renewable energy research and implementation grants, loans, subsidies and mandates drive projects to replace hydrocarbons that are still abundant and still 82% of all US energy consumed. Many recipientswent bankrupt despite huge taxpayer grants and loan guarantees. Wind turbine installations butcher millions of birds and bats annually, but are exempt from Endangered Species Act fines and penalties.

Tesla Motors received $256 million to produce electric cars for wealthy elites who receive $2,500 to $7,500 in tax credits, plus free charging and express lane access. From 2007 to 2013, corn ethanol interests spent$158 million lobbying for more “green” mandates and subsidies – and $6 million in campaign contributions – for a fuel that reduces mileage, damages engines, requires enormous amounts of land, water and fertilizer, and from stalk to tailpipe emits more carbon dioxide than gasoline.

General Electric spends tens of millions lobbying for more taxpayer renewable energy dollars; so do many other companies. The payoffs add up to tens of billions of dollars, from taxpayers and consumers.

3) Regulatory fiats increasingly substitute for laws and carbon taxes thatCongress refuses to enact, due to concerns about economic and employment impacts, and because China, India and other countries’ CO2 emissions dwarf America’s. EPA’s war on coal has already claimed thousands of jobs, raised electricity costs for millions of businesses and families, and adversely affected living standards, health and welfare for millions of families. The White House and EPA are also targeting oil and gas drilling and fracking.

Now the Obama Administration is unleashing a host of new mandates and standards, based on arbitrary “social cost of carbon” calculations that assume fossil fuel use imposes numerous climate and other costs, but brings minimal or no economic or societal benefits. The rules will require onerous new energy efficiency and CO2 emission reduction standards that will send consumer costs skyrocketing, while channeling billions of dollars to retailers, installers, banks and mostly overseas manufacturers.

As analyst Roger Bezdek explains, water heaters that now cost $675-1,500 will soon cost $1,200-2,450 – with newfangled exhaust fans, vent pipes and condensate removal systems. Pickup trucks with more fuel efficiency and less power will nearly double in price. Microwaves, cell phones, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, toasters, coffee pots, lawn mowers, photocopiers, televisions and almost everything else will cost far more. Poor and middle class families will get clobbered, to prevent perhaps 5% of the USA’s 15% of all human CO2 emissions toward 0.04% of atmospheric CO2, and maybe 0.00001 degrees of warming.

4) A new UN climate treaty would limit fossil fuel use by developed countries, place no binding limits or timetables on developing nations, and redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries that claim they have been harmed by emissions and warming due to rich country hydrocarbon use. Even IPCC officials now openly brag that climate policy has “almost nothing” to do with protecting the environment – and everything to do with intentionally transforming the global economy and redistributing its wealth.

5) Vicious personal attacks continue on scientists, businessmen, politicians and others who disagree publicly with the catechism of climate cataclysm. Alarmist pressure groups and Democrat members of Congress are out to destroy the studies, funding, reputations and careers of all who dare challenge climate disaster tautologies. At President Obama’s behest, even disaster aid agencies are piling on.

New FEMA rules require that any state seeking disaster preparedness funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency must first assess how climate change threatens their communities. This will mean relying on discredited, worthless alarmist models that routinely spew out predictions unrelated to reality. It likely means no federal funds will go to states that include or focus on natural causes, historical records or models that have better track records than those employed by the IPCC, EPA and President.

6) Thought control. In addition to vilifying climate chaos skeptics, alarmists are determined to control all thinking on the subject. They are terrified that people will find realist analyses and explanations far more persuasive. They refuse to debate skeptics, respond to NIPCC and other studies examining natural climate change and carbon dioxide benefits to wildlife and agriculture, or even admit there is no consensus.

They want the news media to ignore us but cannot put the internet genie back in the bottle. The White House is trying, though. It even sent picketers to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s home, to demand that he knuckle under and apply 1930s’ telephone laws to the internet, as a first step in content control States must refuse to play the climate crisis game.

Through lawsuits, hearings, investigations and other actions, governors, legislators, AGs and other officials can delay EPA diktats, educate citizens about solar and other natural forces, and explain the huge costs and trifling benefits of these draconian regulations.

Congress should hold hearings, demand an accounting of agency expenditures, require solid evidence for every climate claim and regulation, and cross-examine Administration officials on details. It should slash EPA and other agency budgets, so they cannot keep giving billions to pressure groups, propagandists and attack dogs. Honesty, transparency, accountability and a much shorter leash are long overdue.
CFACT

EU’s Green Policies. An Example That No One Should Follow!

April 16, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

EU’s green energy debacle shows the futility of climate change policies

Benny Peiser, Special to Financial Post | April 14, 2015

David Ramos/Getty ImagesA wind turbine spins at a wind farm on February 19, 2015 near Zaragoza, Spain.

Ontario will follow the EU at its peril — power rates will soar while industries depart

As the Ontario government announces new unilateral climate policies, Canadian policymakers would be well advised to heed the lessons of Europe’s self-defeating green energy debacle.

The European Union has long been committed to unilateral efforts to tackle climate change. For the last 20 years, Europe has felt a duty to set an example through radical climate policy-making at home. Political leaders were convinced that the development of a low-carbon economy based on renewables would give Europe a competitive advantage.

European governments have advanced the most expensive forms of energy generation at the expense of the least expensive kinds. No other major emitter has followed the EU’s aggressive climate policy and targets. As a result, electricity prices in Europe are now more than double those in North America and Europe’s remaining and struggling manufacturers are rapidly losing ground to international competition. European companies and investors are pouring money into the U.S., where energy prices have fallen to less than half those in the EU, thanks to the shale gas revolution.

Although EU policy has managed to reduce CO2 emissions domestically, this was only achieved by shifting energy-intensive industries to overseas locations without stringent emission limits, where energy and labour is cheap and which are now growing much faster than the EU.

Most products consumed in the EU today are imported from countries without binding CO2 targets. While the EU’s domestic CO2 emissions have fallen, if you factor in CO2 emissions embedded in goods imported into EU, the figure remains substantially higher.

Of all the unintended consequences of EU climate policy perhaps the most bizarre is the detrimental effect of wind and solar schemes on the price of electricity generated by natural gas. Many gas power plants can no longer operate enough hours. They incur big costs as they have to be switched on and off to back-up renewables.

Most products consumed in the EU today are imported from countries without binding CO2 targets

This week, Germany’s energy industry association warned that more than half of all power plants in planning are about to fold: Even the most efficient gas-fired power plants can no longer be operated profitably.

Every 10 new units worth of wind power installation has to be backed up with some eight units worth of fossil fuel generation. This is because fossil fuel plants have to power up suddenly to meet the deficiencies of intermittent renewables. In short, renewables do not provide an escape route from fossil fuel use without which they are unsustainable.

Gas-fired power generation has become uneconomic in the EU, even for some of the most efficient and least carbon-intensive plants. At the end of 2013, 14 per cent of the EU’s installed gas-fired plants stood still, had closed or were at risk of closure. If all gas plants currently under review were to close, this would amount to 28 per cent of current capacity by 2016. Almost 20 per cent of gas power plants in Germany have already become unprofitable and face shutdown as renewables flood the electricity grid with preferential energy.

To avoid blackouts, the government has to subsidize uneconomic gas and coal power plants. Already half of the 28 EU countries have in place or are planning to subsidize fossil fuel power plants to keep the lights on.

Germany’s renewable energy levy, which subsidizes green energy production, rose from 14 billion euros to 20 billion euros in just one year as a result of the fierce expansion of wind and solar power projects. Since the introduction of the levy in 2000, the electricity bill of the typical German consumer has doubled.

As wealthy homeowners and business owners install wind turbines on their land and solar panels on their homes and commercial buildings, low-income families all over Europe have had to foot the skyrocketing electric bills. Many can no longer afford to pay, so the utilities are cutting off their power. The German Association of Energy Consumers estimates that up to 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off because they were unable to pay the country’s rising electricity bills.

The EU’s unilateral climate policy is absurd. First consumers are forced to pay ever increasing subsidies for wind and solar energy; secondly they are asked to subsidize nuclear energy too; thirdly, they are forced to pay for increasingly uneconomic coal and gas plants to back up power needed by intermittent wind and solar energy; fourthly, consumers are additionally hit by multi-billion subsidies that become necessary to upgrade the national grids; fifthly, the cost of power is made even more expensive by adding a unilateral Emissions Trading Scheme. Finally, because Europe has created such a foolish scheme that is crippling its heavy industries, consumers are forced to pay even more billions in subsidizing almost the entire manufacturing sector.

In the last few years, major economies such as Canada, Australia and Japan have begun to realize the futility of going it alone and have retreated from unilateral policies and targets. Now even the EU has decided to walk away and has adopted a conditional climate pledge. It has burdened European taxpayers and businesses with astronomical costs while shifting its heavy industry and CO2 emissions to other parts of the world. Europe’s climate policy failure demonstrates beyond doubt that its unilateralism has been a complete fiasco. The lessons of this self-defeating debacle are clear: Don’t make the same mistakes or you will face the same fiasco.

Benny Peiser is the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Forum. The text is based on written evidence he gave to the Committee on Environment and Public Works of the U.S. Senate.

When the Money Tap Shuts Off, the Wind Pushers Will Scatter!

March 26, 2015March 26, 2015 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

US Take on the Colossal Subsidies ‘Essential’ For Wind Power Outfits to Survive

March 26, 2015 by stopthesethings

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As the world wakes up to scale and scope of the great wind power fraud, the numbers men have started to put pen to paper, in an effort to get a proper bead on the size of the massive subsidies being filched from power consumers and taxpayers, and pocketed by wind power outfits – a merry band of blood-sucking leeches, if ever there was one.

One of the numbers men is Rob Nikolewski, the National Energy Correspondent for Watchdog.org. He’s based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and tallies up the damage to power consumers and taxpayers in this little piece.

Solar and wind energy pack a wallop — in federal subsidies
Rob Nikolewski
Watchdog.org
20 March 20 2015

Wind and solar make up but a small percentage of the U.S. energy portfolio, yet lead the pack when it comes to federal energy subsidies.

A study by the nonpartisan Energy Information Administration shows wind and solar finished in top two among all energy sectors in raking in federal subsidies. In fiscal year 2013, wind subsidies topped $5.9 billion. The solar industry received $5.3 billion.

The solar sector saw the biggest jump in federal subsidies between fiscal years 2010 and 2013 — climbing nearly five-fold, from $1.1 billion to $5.3 billion — “with declining solar costs and state-level policies also supporting additional growth,” the EIA report said.

While wind energy received the most subsidies, its rate of increase was less than 10 percent between 2010 and 2013.

Here’s the chart the EIA put out March 13:

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Despite the increase in solar and wind subsidies, overall federal energy subsidies decreased 23 percent, dropping from $38.0 billion to $29.3 billion.

Fossil fuel subsidies declined by 15 percent, from $4.0 billion to $3.4 billion, according to the numbers by the EIA, which is an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The EIA report came at the request of Congress, but officials at the Solar Energy Industries Association say the study’s parameters were too confining.

“The request was narrowly defined to only include subsidies with clear identifiable impacts on the U.S. Treasury and that are provisions specific to energy,” Ken Johnson, SEIA’s vice president of communications, told Watchdog.org in an email. “This restrictive definition leaves out some of the largest fossil and nuclear subsidies, which, unfortunately, results in a skewed, apples-to-oranges comparison.”

Johnson also said the EIA report did not include loan guarantees.

The American Wind Energy Association criticized the EIA report as well, calling it “incomplete and distorted.”

“Fossil fuels have benefited from permanent incentives for nearly a century, and nuclear for more than half a century, while tax incentives for less mature renewable energy technologies such as wind came only recently and have often been enacted for only short-term periods,” said Shauna Theel, AWEA deputy director of digital media, wrote in a blog post on the organization’s website.

The Institute for Energy Research, a research organization that advocates free-market solutions to energy issues, took the EIA study a step further.

The IER calculated federal subsidies and support per unit of electricity production from the EIA charts and concluded that on a per dollar basis, the solar industry is subsidized 345 times more than coal and oil and natural gas electricity production, and wind is subsidized 52 times more than more conventional fossil fuels.

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“Wind and solar are vastly more subsidized than these other sources,” said Chris Warren, director of communications at the IER. “Despite this massive amount of taxpayer dollars going towards these energy sources, they still produce such a small, small potion of our electricity. So you’re not getting a lot of bang for your buck.”

According to another EIA report published last year, wind and solar combine for 4.36 percent of the nation’s total electricity generation.

But wind and solar’s supporters point out that those numbers have been increasing, and say the EIA and IER studies don’t take into account the value of clean energy to the environment.

“Wind energy creates billions of dollars in economic value by drastically reducing pollution that harms public health and the environment, but wind energy does not get paid for that even though consumers bear many of those costs,” Theel wrote.

Johnson, the solar spokeman, said breaking down the energy sources by unit of production is misleading.

“… (M)ost subsidies are front-loaded, traditional generation, such as coal, nuclear and hydro, received their government support years or decades ago, and the plants built with that support continued to exist and generate energy in 2013 — even if their support did not include substantial outlays in 2013,” Johnson said.

“The big takeaway is that no matter how many subsidies and taxpayer dollars we throw at these energy sources, they can’t meet our everyday electricity needs,” Warren said in a telephone interview. “And that’s what’s most important about energy and electricity resources. Are they going to be there on demand when we need them and are they going to be affordable? No amount of subsidies to wind or solar is going to fix that.”

The charts bring up a question that’s been debated for years in the energy industry: What constitutes a government subsidy? Does it include tax breaks? What about incentives?

“The Energy Information Administration data do not account for the uncertainty that renewable energy businesses have had to face as a result of temporary incentives that are extended for only short periods of time,” Theel said.

Johnson cited a study showing solar incentives are in line with those given to other energy industries.

“What’s more, solar is following a similar curve in development as traditional energy sources (coal, gas, oil), which received substantial subsidies during their growth period and are now still getting many of them,” Johnson said in his email.

Warren said subsidies “across the board distort the market.”

“We’re for a level playing field. That means getting rid of all these different subsidies, whether it’s for the fossil fuel industry, for nuclear, for wind and for solar,” Warren said. “We should just do away with them all and let these energy sources compete based on merit and the values they provide consumers.”

Click here to read the entire EIA report on energy subsidies and click hereto read the IER study.
Watchdog.org

Wind weasels Lose $700 Million in “Investors” money! Blown Into the Wind!

March 15, 2015 / 1957chev / 4 Comments

Pacific Hydro’s Ponzi Scheme Implodes: Wind Power Outfit Loses $700 Million of Mum & Dad Retirement Savings

March 15, 2015 by stopthesethings

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Pacific Hydro is a name synonymous with wind industry skulduggery in Australia: the merciless treatment of its victims at Cape Bridgewater has been added to the annals of Australian corporate infamy, right up there with Aussie asbestos pedlar, James Hardie (see our post here).

Now, its slap-dash approach to management, and all-round corporate malfeasance, has caught up with it, with an almighty vengeance.

Pac Hydro is the bastard child of IFM Investors – born of the $billions that are collected from workers and thrown into what are called “Union Super Funds” – ie “superannuation”: compulsory retirement savings schemes – owned and controlled by union heavies, like Garry Weaven and/or Labor Party front men; like former Environment Minister, Greg Combet.

Combet, Weaven & Co are the driving force behind the great wind power fraud in Australia. It was Combet who lobbied for, and obtained, the massive increase in Australia’s Renewable Energy Target to 45,000 GWh (4,000 as “small-scale” solar; and 41,000 as “large-scale”, ie wind power).

But these boys set up the “rules” with only one real “target” in mind; and that was making fat piles of cash themselves, using bucket loads of other peoples’ money: being able to make massive profits without any personal risk is a rare and beautiful thing.

But the risk has just been realised; and it’s mums and dads who are paying, and will continue to pay, the ultimate price.

Pac Hydro has just clocked up one of the largest corporate losses ever seen in Australian corporate history: you need to think back to Alan Bond, Chris Skase and the massive corporate implosions that took place at the end of the crazy 80s, to find anything of the same scale.

Pac Hydro’s books apparently record a loss of $685 million – the Australian Financial Review says “$700 million” – but with losses of that magnitude a lazy $15 million is probably just a rounding error.

From what STT can glean, around half of that figure is attributable to losses incurred by Pac Hydro’s wind farm operations in Australia (it’s pretty hard to get a bead on the numbers when, as the AFR explains, the company is going to “extraordinary lengths to keep [its review into the losses] under wraps”.

Just how a wind power outfit enjoying the most ludicrously massive industry subsidies provided in the history of the Australian Commonwealth can “lose” $700 million of workers’ superannuation money is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, to which we shall return in a moment. Now, here’s a couple of wrap-ups on Pac Hydro’s Ponzi scheme implosion.

Governance scandal claims Garry Weaven and Brett Himbury
The Australian Financial Review
Tony Boyd
5 March 2015

Industry superannuation fund heavyweights Garry Weaven and Brett Himbury are under pressure to resign from the board of global fund manager IFM Investors after a secret report into $700 million in losses at Pacific Hydro was blamed on lapses in corporate governance.

Weaven and Himbury resigned from the board of Pacific Hydro on January 1 this year after a review of its corporate governance by an executive director of IFM Investors, Danny Elia made adverse findings in relation to corporate governance.

The pressure for Weaven and Himbury to also resign from the board of IFM Investors is coming from investors in the IFM Australia Infrastructure Fund, which owns 100 per cent of Pacific Hydro. The IFM Australia Infrastructure Fund is managed by IFM Investors.

Chanticleer understands several investors in the trust are angry about the lack of transparency about Elia’s review of governance at Pacific Hydro.

The losses incurred by Pacific Hydro have meant that its value in the IFM Australian Infrastructure Fund have shrunk from 40per cent of total assets to about 8 per cent.

IFM Investors said in October last year that it had taken a near $700 million write-down on Pacific Hydro due to the adverse impact of the Abbott government’s review into renewable energy, weaker electricity demand in Australia, and tax changes in Chile.

The Chilean investment, the $US450 million ($575 million) Chacayes run-of-river power plant halved in value as a result of the regulatory and tax changes.

However, IFM has said nothing about Elia’s review of the governance of Pacific Hydro.

His review, code named Project Primavera, has not only been kept secret, IFM Investors has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep it under wraps.

Any investors in the IFM Australia Infrastructure Fund or asset consultants wanted to look at the 200-page Project Primavera report must sign a confidentiality agreement.

No copies of the report are allowed to leave the IFM premises, no photocopies of the report are allowed and anyone reading the report must surrender their smartphones before entering a room where the report is available.

The findings of the report and the resignations of Weaven and Himbury from Pacific Hydro have not been reported either on the websites of IFM Investors or Pacific Hydro. Also, the story has not been reported by The New Daily, an online news site owned by industry super funds.

Pacific Hydro’s website does show that the company appointed three new directors this year.

John Harvey replaced Weaven as chairman of Pacific Hydro on February 15. He is a director of Australia Pacific Airports Corporation.

Peter Berry was appointed a director of Pacific Hydro on January 16. He is chairman of the state owned venture capital business, Victorian Clean Technology Fund.

Michael Hanna was appointed a director of Pacific Hydro on February 10. He is responsible for managing the IFM Australian Infrastructure Fund.

Those appointments are significant because it means that there are now more people on the board of Pacific Hydro with operational experience. There was clearly a lack of hands on infrastructure management experience before.

Apart from Weaven and Himbury, two other directors have resigned in the past few months. Anita Roper resigned on January 1 this year and Geoffrey Coffey resigned on December 31, 2014, according to records with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

The angst among investors about the governance failings at Pacific Hydro have prompted IFM Investors to launch its own internal review of governance, according to industry sources.

It is not known who is conducting this review or whether it will have the power to recommend changes in governance at IFM.

The departure of Weaven from the board of Pacific Hydro would have been deeply felt as he was one of the driving forces behind the industry super fund sector’s push into renewable energy.

The Pacific Hydro write-downs and subsequent board resignations draw attention to the conflicts of interest which can occur when shareholders of a funds management company are also investors in its various products.

The fact that an employee of IFM, Elia, was called on to conduct a review of an IFM managed entity suggests it was not a completely independent arm’s length project.

The $700 million in losses at Pacific Hydro raises questions about the quality of advice received by IFM Investors from its extensive team of global infrastructure advisers which includes former chief executives at global companies.

Weaven and Himbury did not respond to email requests for comment and a spokesperson for Pacific Hydro said all comment about corporate governance at the company should come from IFM Investors. The spokesperson failed to call back.
The Australian Financial Review

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Pair step down after Hydro’s $685m loss
The Australian
Andrew White
6 March 2015

INDUSTRY superannuation fund godfather Garry Weaven and the chief executive of IFM Investors, Brett Himbury, resigned from the board of renewable energy investor Pacific Hydro last October following a $685 million loss.

Mr Weaven said he and Mr Himbury had resigned as directors to take responsibility for heavy writedowns on investments in Chilean and Australian energy assets that should have been anticipated.

“It was done on the basis that when you have a writedown like that there should be consequences. We should show that we take this very, very seriously.”

But he denied a report that there had been any pressure on him or Mr Himbury to resign from the IFM Investors board.

Mr Weaven said there had been no votes against him when he stood for re-election at the IFM Investors annual meeting in November. “There was absolutely no pressure on me or Brett Himbury to resign, none, zero.”

Pacific Hydro announced the $685m loss in October after the government abandoned its support for the Renewable Energy Target, which supported the value of wind and solar energy projects owned by the company, and changes to tax laws in Chile that halved the value of its investment in a hydro-electricity project. Mr Weaven said the Australian investments had also been cut in value following changes to the pricing rules from the Australian Energy Regulator at the end of June.

Mr Weaven “completely rejects” a report in a newspaper yesterday that there were any corporate governance issues that resulted in the losses.
The Australian

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Hmmm. Losing $685 million of mums’ and dads’ superannuation money would, in most peoples’ eyes, involve some deliberate effort, beyond being simply “asleep at the corporate wheel”.

While Weaven protests his corporate “innocence”, just imagine the size of Pac Hydro’s losses if there had been “any corporate governance issues”!!

And it’s not just mum and dads with their hard-earned retirement savings being thrown to the wind by Weaven & Co. Oh no, all Australian taxpayers are going to take a whopping financial hit on this one. Pac Hydro pocketed over $70 million in taxpayer underwritten “loans” from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (a $10 billion “renewable” scam slush fund set up by the Green/Labor Alliance) for its non-compliant Cape Bridgewater operation. Now that pile of taxpayers’ cash is at risk, along with hundreds of $millions more (see our post here).

The standard response from these corporate cowboys – that it was “uncertainty surrounding the Renewable Energy Target” that drove one of the largest losses in Australian corporate history – falls a little flat when it is understood that there has been NO change at all to the legislation underpinning the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET), despite wind industry whingeing and wailing, as if it had been torched altogether.

The derisory list of “excuses” used by wind power outfits to explain their mounting losses grows by the day: near-bankrupt wind power outfit, Infigen (aka Babcock & Brown) continues to blame the vagaries of the weather on its abysmally poor financial performance – an $8.9 million loss for 2013/14, which follows a $55 million loss in 2011/12 and an $80 million loss for 2012/13 (see our posts here and here). After another laughable performance in the last half of 2014, it took to pointing the finger at – wait for it – “THE WIND” – for yet another failure to get anywhere near its “projected” revenues (see this lament from the eco-facists over at ruin-economy). Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

And it’s a theme used around the globe in a “hey, quick look over there” approach to avoid any scrutiny of the real hard numbers (or, rather, the lack of them) that continue to show the woeful reality of wind power outfits’ overblown revenue projections – and the mounting losses being suffered by duped investors when those breezy projections fail to materialize (see our post here).

STT always likes to plunge its cynical spade just a little deeper into the mire than most; and, in relation to the great wind power fraud, always relishes the opportunity to do so. Even a cursory dig reveals the parallels with some of the greatest scams in history.

In recent times, Australia has seen gullible (and, perhaps, “greedy”) mum and dad investors fleeced to the tune of $billions in Managed Investment Schemes. Back in the late 1980s, the Commonwealth government amended tax legislation to provide huge tax benefits for investments in “Managed Investment Schemes”. During the late 1990s and 2000s, the tax change saw a flood of money pour into industrial scale vineyards; timber, olive and almond plantations. The MIS tax breaks were rightly considered a monstrous tax rort that allowed companies running Managed Investment Schemes to make obscene profits upfront at investors’ ultimate expense. In 2007, the government scrapped the tax breaks – a decision which led to enormous corporate collapses of MIS outfits – like Timbercorp and Great Southern Plantations – with MIS investors collectively losing 100s of $millions.

Then there are the earlier “corporate investment classics”, like the South-Sea Bubble and Dutch tulip mania.

The common theme in all of these rorts, is that those filching the money always tend to blame somebody else as the scam turns sour; and the investors’ money goes “missing”: albeit that in the case of the great wind power fraud, mum and dads’ “missing” $millions can be readily located in the form of Sydney Harbour-side mansions and fleets of Aston Martins, Beamers and Mercs – snapped up by the managers of super funds and wind power outfits, as fitting symbols of their financial “finesse”.

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So, how do wind power outfits routinely end up with results that show their revenue projections to be little more than financial fantasy?

Wind power outfits routinely base their expected returns on pumped up wind forecasts – thereby way overstating their anticipated gross returns (see our posts here and here and here and here).

While, at the same time, lying about their true operating costs (see ourpost here), which start to tack up pretty quickly when it’s revealed that turbines last less than half the time claimed: with an ‘economic’ lifespan of 10-12 years, as opposed to the 25 years wildly claimed by fan makers and wind power outfits (see our posts here and here).

Or, in the case of top-flight German manufacturer, Siemens – less than 2 years – one of it’s latest batches required wholesale blade and bearing replacement, starting almost as soon as they cranked them into gear (seeour post here) – Siemens blaming “harsh weather conditions both onshore and offshore” – as if its fans had been designed to run inside aircraft hangars ….

In the Californian desert – where salty-sea-air is unlikely to be the “problem” often complained about for rusty off-shore turbines, as they grind to early “retirement” – an entire fleet of 2 year old Siemens fans are throwing their blades to the four-winds, spewing out oil like Saudi Arabia and spontaneously combusting – making a mockery of wind industry claims that turbines run on the smell of an oily rag for 25 years or more (see our post here).

The other key factor in the fraud, is the overly optimistic expectation that the value and longevity of government mandated subsidy schemes – like the LRET and the REC Tax/Subsidy drawn from retail power consumers’ bills and directed to wind power outfits – hold the same degree of permanence as the Egyptian Pyramids.

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However, while they’re no guide to the permanence of taxpayer’ and power consumers’ (forced) largesse, the shape of the Pharaohs’ tombs informs another aspect of the great wind power fraud: the fact that, when it all boils down, this is a monumental pyramid scheme, that would have made Charles Ponzi green with envy.

Some might call it “high hopes”, others, “hubris”, but either way, when the corporate puff evaporates, it’s the investors that take the beating.

The dreadful “uncertainty” about the willingness of governments to continue fleecing power consumers and taxpayers – in order to keep throwing massive subsidies at the greatest rort of all time (which, on the wind industry’s pitch will be needed until kingdom come) – has resulted in the collapse of more than 120 wind industry suppliers in the past two years, “including 88 from Asia, 23 from Europe and 18 from North America” (see our post here).

In Germany – despite the fact the the wind industry there has pocketed the lion’s share of at “least half a trillion € in subsidies” – German investors are taking a flogging: “37 percent of wind farms are losing investors’ money” and “two thirds are in deficit or just about cover their running costs” (see our post here).

And American “farmer investors” have been fleeced for $millions, as breezy optimism hits revenue reality (see our post here).

Around the world, wind farm investors are being fleeced by the same types of hucksters and weasels that run outfits like Infigen and Pac Hydro; and the smarmy gits that set up so-called “community wind farms” – praying on greed and gullibility in their efforts to pocket $billions in REC Tax/Subsidies.

The scam is the same the world over: pitch numbers that show returns that are too good to be true (they are) and watch the suckers beat a path to your door: greed trumps common sense often enough.

As PT Barnum said: “every crowd has a silver lining” – an adage put to great effect by wholesale fraudsters like Bernie Madoff in scams often tagged “Ponzi” schemes; named after Charles Ponzi – who would have taken to the wind industry like a duck to water.

Madoff – who ended up with a 150 year stretch in stir for his share-market shenanigans – would, no doubt, be pleased to know that the wind industry has followed his “model” and is keeping the Ponzi “dream” alive.

For one of Australia’s biggest wind power outfits to lose $700 million in a single financial year is no small thing – it takes real effort. To rack up that kind of loss when the subsidy rules haven’t changed, simply begs the question: “what happens when those rules inevitably get changed, and result in the (currently) massive subsidies paid to wind power outfits being cut or scrapped?”

As STT has pointed out, just once or twice, the LRET is both politically and economically unsustainable (see our posts here and here and here). The LRET will implode: it’s a matter of when, not if.

And the wind industry will collapse along with it; scorching $billions of gullible investors’ money as it does: Pac Hydro’s $700 million loss is just the beginning; and that occurred when the subsidy rules were all in its favour.

If you think you’ve got any of your hard-earned anywhere near wind power outfits, like Pac Hydro and Infigen – in the form of superannuation or shares – then grab it, and get out now.

Of course, if you’re a union member – and one of those whose super contributions get automatically channelled into a super fund “chosen” by your union leaders – it might be time to quiz them on just how safe your retirement nest egg is. With their trotters firmly in the great wind power fraud trough, we doubt you’ll get any straight answers; in which event, you might like to start howling for a Royal Commission.

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