wind and solar

Heartfelt Poetry, from a Victim of the Wind Scam! Life on a Windfarm…

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Life on a Wind Farm: 3 Poems by M. Krochmalnik Grabois

Under the Turbines

Infants and toddlers cannot speak

and even pre-teens

may not have the vocabulary to describe

the unprecedented symptoms they suffer

 

Teenagers can tell you more—

they are developing a lexicon for suffering

They are beginning to see that life is unfair

and full of strife

 

and even if they sometimes feel invulnerable

they watch their parents and know deep inside that

invulnerability is a lie

 

They watch the landscape change around them

see the five-hundred foot turbines erected

 

The sound of the gears up there are not like the sound

of their childhoods swings

which creak in the wind at night

a comforting sound

 

Now they hear the tangible sound of the wealthy

stealing from them

before they have even begun to acquire anything

 

 

More Symptoms from Living in a “Wind Farm”

Sleep disturbance in children and infants is common

Your child may feel bullied

even if no classmate is bullying him

 

He has just begun to get over the idea that there is a monster

under his bed

 

and now he awakens feeling that there is an intruder in the house

an intruder with more powerful weapons than Father’s guns

and a feeling that Father is powerless

against the greater forces in the world

 

Of course, it’s true

Father and his neighbors tried to stop the turbines

He pointed out that the Comprehensive Plan

forbade them

 

Father is powerless

 

Grit

I watch my sleeping daughter grit her teeth

When she was three she had bad earaches

and took so many antibiotics

the doctor forbade us to give her milk

because milk is full of antibiotics

and we can’t afford Organic

 

Now she has ear aches again

This time the doctor says there is no treatment

other than moving out of the “wind farm”

 

It’s the pressure he says

and because of her history she is particularly

vulnerable

 

We all involuntarily explore our vulnerabilities now

 

Anxiety, nervousness—

I’ve learned there’s a difference between the two

but when I startle awake with an elevated heart rate

I’m not sure which is which

 

Nausea

I’ve always eaten like a horse and never felt nauseous in my life

Now I feel nauseous all the time

I can’t figure out how the wind turbines cause nausea

though I’ve been told it’s an inner ear thing

I guess it’s something my daughter and I

have in common

 

My neighbor, the professor

now stands in front of the chalkboard

gripping the edges of the podium

staring at his notes

 

He’s got vertigo

and can’t perambulate around his classroom

speaking extemporaneously

like he used to

 

I never much liked that guy

kind of an egghead

who moved here from some city

for the peace and quiet

That’s a laugh, ain’t it, Professor?

 

Now I feel more brotherly toward him

We stood up in public hearings

and our arguments, our pleas

were equally ignored by the corrupt commissioners

 

him with his PhD

me with my high school diploma

 

I think I was right not to go on to college

though my mother told me

I was smart enough

 

(Photo Credit: Steve Sutherland)

Toronto School Boards Really Bad at Math!!! (and science!)

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The green mirage: Toronto school board gets free roof repairs for solar panels — or do they?

Toronto School Board flunks outToronto School Board flunks out

Canada’s largest school board, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), is getting an F on management practices.  Ontario’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Energy must also receive a failing grade.

It starts with Toronto’s public schools having leaky roofs.  The TDSB, with much fanfareMay 2011, found the Holy Grail when they struck a deal with AMP Solar Limited Partnership for solar panels on school roofs.  TDSB thought the deal with AMP would result in free roof repairs on 450 schools, and, after AMP recovered the cost of the repairs, TDSB would also receive 14.5% of the solar power revenue generated from the Feed-In Tariff or FIT contracts they hoped to obtain from the OPA (Ontario Power Authority).  On paper it sounded wonderful; TDSB’s Director of Education Chris Spence said,  “This is a win-win for everyone involved.”

What he meant was, it would be a losing proposition for Ontario’s ratepayers.

What has happened since that announcement shows someone didn’t do their math homework or anticipate what might go wrong.

One year later: there were delays as the rules under the FIT program changed, creating lower prices for roof-top solar, and then McGuinty prorogued the Legislature.  TheToronto Sun quoted Chris Bolton, TDBS’s chair, confessing the Board didn’t have an alternate plan.  The story went on to say the Ontario government “encouraged” the TDSB to turn to FIT as a resolution to its roof repair backlog.   It is not clear if that suggestion came from the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Energy.  If it was, it was as a neat budget gambit to fool the taxpayers while sticking it to the ratepayers.   Three weeks prior to the Sun article the Ministry of Education froze new construction approvals, “citing concerns the TDSB was going over budget on building projects and in danger of not wiping out an existing $50 million capital deficit.”

A few “snags”

Fast forward July 25, 2014: the reporter who wrote the Toronto Sun story wrote one for the National Post  headlined  “Solar panel upgrades for public schools hit snags”.  The article infers “the costs” to repair the roofs are “higher than first pegged” and goes on to explain, “That’s because of greater-than-expected costs to the board’s private partner-School Top Solar LP-for roofing, installing the panels and fees to Toronto Hydro for hooking up to its power grid.”  It is unclear who School Top Solar LP is—the original TDSB partner was AMP Solar Limited Partnership, but perhaps they flipped the project to take a nice profit (as has happened with so many companies) that have obtained FIT contracts).

The result of this wonder story is that the most TDSB will get out of this free deal will be to replace one-sixth (720,000 sq. ft.) of the 4.3 million square feet of roofs.    They can also kiss goodbye to the 14.5% energy revenue Chris Spence thought they would get.

Let’s see where the mistakes were made. First, the math on the 66 MW that will be installed: based on the original roof-top solar prices ($700 per megawatt hour), the 66 MW could have generated in excess of $40 million annually and $806 million over the 20-year life of the contract. The developer (AMP) claimed the 66 MW would produce enough electricity to power 6,000 average homes, which means 57,600 megawatt hours (MWh) of power yearly.

Now the roof repair costs: roof replacement repairs to the 4.3 million square feet would run to $8 or $9 per sq. ft., meaning total costs would be in the $40 million range.  Capital cost of solar per MW is $5 million (approximately) as estimated by the U.S. EIA, so 66 MW would have cost $330 million making total costs (including roof repairs) about $370 million and recovery of the cost outlays (including maintenance) should have taken nine to ten years.

If it looks too good to be true, maybe…

The reduction in the FIT rates threw the “free” roof idea into jeopardy. It now looks like the TDSB will have to go cap in hand to the Minister of Education, Liz Sandals, if they want those leaking roofs fixed, without making the Board’s $50-million capital deficit disappear.

What’s funny is that now, as reality hits, a few of the education board trustees interviewed for the National Post said they actually want to blame the school principals(some of them had requested adjustments to the placement of the equipment used to hook up the panels to Toronto Hydro’s electricity grid).

Perhaps Ms. Sandals will solve the TDSB dilemma by getting the teachers unions to back down on their demands for raises and pension benefits until the roof leaks have been plugged!

This is another example of the many logic failures brought to Ontario by the Liberal government and its push for renewable energy on a large-scale!

Parker Gallant,

July 28, 2014

Windweasels Won’t Take NO for an Answer! Appealing Court Decision!

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Utility Appeals Wind Turbine Noise Court Ruling

Ruling could impact wind plants across Michigan

By JACK SPENCER | July 29, 2014

The Lake Winds Energy Plant in Mason County.

Consumers Energy is appealing the 51st Circuit Court ruling that upheld Mason County’s determination that the Lake Winds Energy Plant near Ludington is in violation of the county’s 45-decibel noise ordinance.

Arguing that the County’s decision was an “erroneous ruling,” the utility filed a 38-page appeal with the Michigan Court of Appeals on July 18. In addition, Consumers Energy is saying that if the ruling by 51st Circuit Court Judge Richard Cooper were allowed to stand, it could have an impact on many other wind turbine plants across the state.

“This has implications beyond just Mason County,” Dennis Marvin, spokesman for Consumers Energy told Capitol Confidential. “We believe the study the county based its decision on was flawed. We took this decision (to appeal) very seriously, but ultimately our legal staff determined this was in the best interest of our customers and the landowners at the wind park.”

Rick James, of East Lansing-based E-Coustic Solutions, is an acoustician specializing in the production, control, transmission, reception and effects of sound. According to James, Consumers Energy is not exaggerating when it talks about the potential impact of the Lake Winds case.

“Consumers’ appeal has less to do with the supposed 1 decibel error, the topic of the appeal, and more to do with the wind industry’s broader concerns,” James said. “A decision by the Appeals Court in favor of Mason County would make it easier for other counties and townships with wind energy utility noise regulations to prove non-compliance.”

“Consumers would have been better advised if they had not accepted the conclusions of their acoustical consultant that the proposed project could be fit into the host community without causing problems,” James continued. “Both Consumers and its consultant should have known from past work on other projects that locating large, utility-scale wind turbines close to residential homes was likely to result in the type of litigation now in progress.”

Located south of Ludington, Lake Winds was the utility company’s first wind plant project in Michigan. Residents who live near the $255 million, 56-turbine facility started complaining of health problems shortly after the turbines began operating. They filed a lawsuit on April 1, 2013, arguing that noise, vibrations and flickering lights emanating from the wind plant were adversely affecting their health. Among the symptoms noted in the lawsuit were dizziness, sleeplessness and headaches.

Less than six months later, in September 2013, the Mason County Planning Commission determined that the wind plant was not in compliance with safety guidelines. CMS Energy, which is the parent company of Consumers Energy, then appealed that decision to the Mason County Zoning Board of Appeals and lost. In January, CMS took the case to court again, where it lost once more.

As the case began at the Circuit Court level, in January, the utility asked Judge Cooper to delay the requirement that it make efforts to mitigate the alleged noise problem until the court made its final ruling. Cooper denied that request. Now, as part of its appeal, Consumers Energy is asking the same thing of the Appeals Court.

“Lake Winds is an embarrassment for CMS and for good reason,” said Kevon Martis, director of the Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition, a nonprofit organization that is concerned about the construction of wind turbines in the region. “They denied well-established science that indicated in advance that this project would not comply with the noise language CMS essentially dictated to Mason County. The truth is that even if CMS complied with the wind turbine noise limits they demanded from Mason County, evidence from inside Lake Winds, as well as inside almost every major wind plant across the state, is clear: 45-decibel wind turbine noise limits are not adequate to protect homeowners whose township has been turned into a 47-story tall power plant.”

“Ohio just recently modified their turbine setback standards to 1,320 feet and for that distance to be established from property lines,” Martis continued. “Our home rule townships would be wise to adopt similar or stronger language to protect their residents from such abuse.”

Marvin denied that CMS dictated the details of Mason County’s noise ordinance.

“We provided input and so did others,” Marvin said.

Lake Winds is part of the utility’s effort to meet Michigan’s renewable energy mandate, which requires that 10 percent of the state’s energy be produced by in-state renewable sources by 2015. The mandate was supposedly aimed at reducing carbon emissions, however; the 2008 law did not require the monitoring of emissions to measure the mandate’s actual impact. 

~~~~~

Renewable Energy Targets, are the Best Targets to Miss. Stop them All Together!

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Hostages to a renewable ruse

Written by Nick Cater, Australian on 28 July 2014.

wind farm blightIf there is a sound more pitiable than the whine of a pious environmental activist, it is the wail of a ­financier about to do his dough.

The mournful chorus now wafting from Greg Hunt’s waiting room is the sound of the two in unison, pleading with the Environment Minister to save the life of their misshapen bastard child, the renewable energy target.

You have to hand it to Hunt, who either has nerves of steel or is stone deaf, for he has retained both his cool and his fortitude.

The RET review by Dick Warburton on the government’s behalf has brought the rent-seekers out in force, for billions of dollars of corporate welfare is resting on its outcome.

As it stands, the RET will produce a bounteous return for a small group of investors shrewd enough to get into the windmill game while the rest of us are slapped with four-figure power bills.

Wind farms may be ugly but they are certainly not cheap, nor is the electricity that trickles from them. No one in their right minds would buy one if they had to sell power for $30 to $40 a megawatt hour, the going rate for conventional producers.

But since the retailers are forced to buy a proportion of renewable power, the windmill mafia can charge two to three times that price, a practice that in any other market would be known as price gouging.

As if a $60 premium were not reward enough, the transaction is further sweetened with a renewable energy certificate that they can sell to energy producers who insist on generating power in a more disreputable manner.

The going rate of $40 a megawatt hour means the total income per megawatt for wind farms is three to five times that of conventional power, and unless the government changes the scheme that return is only going to get better.

In an act of rent-seeking genius, the renewable lobby managed to persuade the Rudd government to set the 2020 target as a quantity — 41 terawatt hours — rather than 20 per cent of overall power as originally proposed.

Since the target was set, the energy generation forecast for 2020 has fallen substantially, meaning the locked-in renewable target is now more like 28 per cent.

That will send conventional producers scrambling for certificates, pushing up their price beyond $100. It’s a mouth-watering prospect for the merchant bankers and venture capitalists who were smart enough to jump on board, and brilliant news for Mercedes dealerships on the lower north shore, but of little or any benefit to the planet.

The cost of this speculative ­financial picnic will be about $17 billion by 2030 or thereabouts, ­according to Deloitte, which produced a report on the messy business last week.

Since the extra cost will be added to electricity bills, the RET is a carbon tax by another name, a regressive impost that will fall most heavily on those with limited incomes, such as pensioners.

The lowest income households already spend 7 per cent of their disposable incomes on energy, according to the Australian Council of Social Service. Energy takes just 2.6 per cent of the budget of those on high incomes.

Thus under the cover of responding to climate change — “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time” — billions of dollars are taken from the poor and given to the rich investors in the unsightly industrial turbines that are blighting the lives of rural communities and stripping value from the properties of people who just wish to be left to live in peace.

Read rest…

Renewable Energy, Still not Viable or Affordable. Just a Novelty!

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MATT RIDLEY: ANOTHER RENEWABLE MYTH GOES UP IN SMOKE

  • Date: 28/07/14
  • Matt Ridley, The Times

If wood-burning power stations are less eco-friendly than coal, we are getting the search for clean energy all wrong

On Saturday my train was diverted by engineering works near Doncaster. We trundled past some shiny new freight wagons decorated with a slogan: “Drax — powering tomorrow: carrying sustainable biomass for cost-effective renewable power”. Serendipitously, I was at that moment reading a report by the chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change on the burning of wood in Yorkshire power stations such as Drax. And I was feeling vindicated.

A year ago I wrote in these pages that it made no sense for the consumer to subsidise the burning of American wood in place of coal, since wood produces more carbon dioxide for each kilowatt-hour of electricity. The forests being harvested would take four to ten decades to regrow, and this is the precise period over which we are supposed to expect dangerous global warming to emerge. It makes no sense to steal beetles’ lunch, transport it halfway round the world, burning diesel as you do so, and charge hard-pressed consumers double the price for the power it generates.

There was a howl of protest on the letters page from the chief executive of Drax power station, which burns a million tonnes of imported North American wood a year and plans to increase that to 7 million tonnes by 2016. But last week, Dr David MacKay’s report vindicated me. If the wood comes from whole trees, as much of it does, then the effect could be to increase carbon dioxide emissions, he finds, even compared with coal. And that’s allowing for the regrowth of forests.

Despite the best efforts of the Conservatives to rein in their Lib Dem colleagues, the renewable-energy bandwagon careers onward, costing ever more money and doing real environmental harm, while producing trivial quantities of energy and risking blackouts next winter. People keep telling me it’s no good being rude about all renewables: some must be better than others. Well, I’m still looking:

Tidal power remains a (literal) non-starter; if you ask ministers why nothing has been built, they say it’s not for want of proffering ludicrously generous subsidies on our behalf. Yet still no takers.

Wave power: again, the sky’s the limit for what the government will pay if you can figure out how to make dynamos and generators survive the buffeting of waves, corrosion of salt and encrustation of barnacles. Nothing doing.

Geothermal: perhaps great potential in the future for heating homes through district heating schemes, though expensive here compared with Iceland, but not much use for electricity. Air-source and ground-source heat pumps, all the rage a few years ago, have generally proved more costly and less effective than advertised, but they are getting better. Trivial contribution so far.

Solar power: one day soon it will make a big impact in sunny countries, and the price is falling fast, but generating for the grid in cloudy Britain where most power is needed on dark winter evenings will probably never make economic sense. Covering fields in Devon with solar panels today is just ecological and economic vandalism. Solar provides about a third of one per cent of world energy.

Offshore wind: Britain is the world leader, meaning we are the only ones foolish enough to pay the huge subsidies (treble the going rate for electricity) to lure foreign companies into tackling the challenge of erecting and maintaining 700ft metal towers in stormy seas. The good news is that the budget for subsidising offshore wind has almost run out. The bad news is that it is already costing us billions a year and ruining coastal views.

Onshore wind: one of the cheapest renewables but still twice as costly as gas or coal, it kills eagles and bats, harms tourism, divides communities and takes up lots of space. The money goes from the poor to the rich, and the carbon dioxide saving is tiny, because of the low density of wind and the need to back it up with diesel generators. These too now need subsidy because they cannot run at full capacity.

Hydro: cheap, reliable and predictable, providing 6 per cent of world energy, but with no possibility for significant expansion in Britain. The current vogue for in-stream generation in lowland streams in England will produce ridiculously little power while messing up the migration of fish.

Anaerobic digestion: a lucrative way of subsidising farmers (yet again) to grow perfectly good food for burning instead of eating. Contrary to myth, nearly all the energy comes from crops such as maize (once fermented into gas), not from food waste. Expensive.

Waste incineration: a great idea. Yet we are currently paying other countries to take it off our hands and burn it overseas. If instead we burned it at home, we would make cheap, reliable electricity. But Nimbys won’t let us.

Over the past ten years the world has invested more than $600 billion in wind power and $700 billion in solar power. Yet the total contribution those two technologies are now making to the world primary energy supply is still less than 2 per cent. Ouch.

Ontario Ministry of Energy Continues Along Their Path of Destruction!

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Goshen Wind Energy Centre approved by Ontario Ministry of Energy 

By John Miner, The London Free Press

Monday, July 28, 2014 

 

NextEra Energy Canada has been given the green light by the Ontario Environment Ministry for a $300-million wind farm in South Huron and Bluewater municipalities near the shoreline of Lake Huron.

The Goshen Wind Energy Centre will involve the construction of about 60 wind turbines with a capacity of 102 megawatts.

Both South Huron and Bluewater councils have passed resolutions declaring themselves unwilling hosts for industrial wind farms. The Goshen project, however, predates changes to the Ontario government’s policies that now require companies show local support in order to win a government contract.

A spokesperson for NextEra said construction of Goshen will start in the next few weeks with site preparation, road construction and excavation of foundation sites.

The company estimates there will be 300 construction workers on the project at the peak.

The Goshen and Grand Bend Wind Farm, a project that has also been approved but is being appealed, have both drawn opposition from people concerned some of the wind turbines will interfere with the migration of tundra swans.

NextEra said in an e-mail it has sited its projects to minimize the impact to the natural environment, including the tundra swans.

There has also been concern raised the Goshen wind farm could interfere with Environment Canada’s weather radar located eight kilometres east of the community of Exeter.

In approving Goshen, the Ontario Environment Ministry stipulated NextEra must work with Environment Canada to ensure the radar system’s ability to detect and monitor extreme weather is not adversely impacted by the facility.

In its move into the London region, Florida-based NextEra Energy took over and developed several wind farms originally planned by other companies​.

Its Bluewater Wind Energy Centre north of Grand Bend started commercial operation earlier this month, while the Bornish wind farm near Parkhill and Adelaide Wind Energy Centre near Strathroy are in their final stages of construction.

NextEra has also started construction of the Jericho Wind Energy Centre in Lambton County. It operates two solar farms as well.

In approving the Goshen project, the Ontario Environment Ministry set down a number of conditions, including that construction be complete within three years and a community liaison committee be established with members from the public and company.

NextEra has also agreed to establish a “community vibrancy fund” to support projects that will benefit local residents.

Faux-green energy is priced beyond affordability for most people!

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Germany’s green tech forces 400x increase in power rates

Posted on July 28, 2014 by

cost development for consumers from the EEG feed-in tariff, from 2003 to 2014, (eeg-kwk.net)

The price of a stable power grid is very steep, one could say it is like a “hockey stick”

Story submitted by Eric Worrall  (h/t John Droz)

Coal and gas electricity companies are being paid up to 400x times the wholesale price of power, in return for helping to stabilize the German electricity grid.

According to Bloomberg, “Germany’s push toward renewable energy is causing so many drops and surges from wind and solar power that the government is paying more utilities than ever to help stabilize the country’s electricity grid.”

“At the beginning, this market counted for only a small portion of our earnings,” said Hartmuth Fenn, the head of intraday, market access and dispatch at Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s biggest utility. “Today, we earn 10 percent of our plant profits in the balancing market”.

Full story http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-24/german-utilities-bail-out-electric-grid-at-wind-s-mercy.html

Given that lignite coal plants are also playing this game, according to Bloomberg, and lignite plants are famously inflexible, you have to wonder exactly how fossil fuel plants are providing the required flexibility.

One interesting possibility is that the CO2 belching fossil fuel utility companies are spinning their generators up to full power, and are simply discarding vast amounts of excess energy, until solar or wind output drops – so they can be ready to dump extra capacity onto the grid at a moment’s notice.

At 400x wholesale rate, they could afford to burn away gigawatts of power as waste heat, and still make a handsome profit from the “balancing” fee for whatever energy they actually supply to the grid.

 

3 MW Wind Turbines Making Life Miserable for Brinston Residents!

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Noise complaints lead to monitoring

by Sandy Casselman
Press staff

BRINSTON – It has been more than six months since the blades of the South Branch Wind Farm turbines began to spin, leaving more than one nearby resident with some sleepless nights.

“I call when it gets to the point I can’t tolerate it anymore and I go to the basement [to sleep],” Brinston resident Leslie Disheau, former president of the South Branch Wind Opposition Group, said. “It is an issue and
I’m not the only person in town with the issue.”

Disheau, who is running for the Municipality of South Dundas’ deputy-mayor seat in this fall’s municipal election, has been staying close to home since the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) installed noise-monitoring equipment at her Brinston Road property last week.

“MOE contacted me and asked if they could put this noise monitoring equipment up,” Disheau said.

The two pieces of equipment measure wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, rainfall, and more, she said.

She has submitted three separate noise complaints so far. Every complaint must be filed with EDP Renewables’ project leader Ken Little and local MOE representative Terry Forrester to be officially registered.

During EDP’s first open community liaison meeting in March, a Brinston man spoke out about his own sleep disturbances, suggesting the turbines be shut off for a period during the early hours of the morning, beginning around midnight. At that time, Little confirmed that there had been one official complaint already registered. He also said an acoustic audit had been ordered, which he expected to get underway within two months of the meeting.

“EDP has not released their post-construction noise audit report,” Disheau said during an interview with the Winchester Press Fri., July 18.

In conversation with one of the MOE officials who installed the equipment, Disheau said she learned that the provincial authority also had not seen a report from EDP.

“They can take as long as they want,” she said, crediting the Green Energy Act with the responsibility for not specifying a deadline. “There is a 40-decibel limit [on the noise the turbines can make], and we have no idea if they’re in the threshold or not.”

To describe what the sound is like, she used Highway 401 versus airplane noise as an example, pointing out that the highway noise is more of a hum, and when she lived near it, the sounds did not bother her at all.
However, the turbines produce something more in line with the “drone of an airplane that goes into your head,” she said. “It’s a deeper tone, and that’s where you get the disturbance of sleep.”

Explaining the noise and its effects on her is not easy, she said, but it is similar to the sensation people get in their chest when listening to bass guitar.

Disheau said she explained her experiences to MOE’s acoustical engineer, adding that the sensations are at their worst when the blade tips of the turbine across the road (south of Brinston) and the one to the north behind her home (west of Brinston) are facing one another.

“The acoustical engineer said ‘yes, that it all makes sense,’” Disheau added. “This is not normal. You should not be in sleep disturbance in your own house.”

Meanwhile, Disheau is the only one in her home experiencing the effects of the rotating blades, as her husband, who shares the second storey bedroom on the home’s vinyl-sided addition, is tone deaf, and her children sleep on the first floor of the brick-sided main house.

The noise-monitoring equipment is controlled by a switch, which has been placed inside Disheau’s home. When she notices the noise, she flips the switch and the machinery calculates and documents the findings.

“Once everything is taken down, the ministry guy goes through [the recordings] and writes his report,” she said, which will list the decibel readings for various weather conditions (wind speed and direction).

When asked what she hopes to accomplish through this procedure, Disheau said the findings could require that EDP shut down operations during specific times of the day or during specific wind conditions should they prove the decibel levels exceed the regulated amount.

Faux-Green Wind Energy….it’s all about the money!

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Wind power production tax credit: Wall St. wolf in green clothing 

By Curtis Ellis

The tax incentive for wind power expired last year, and the battle over its extension is now underway. Opponents say the wind power production tax credit, PTC, is a wasteful boondoggle while supporters say it’s crucial for renewable energy and jobs. The Sierra Club calls it “one of the best bets we’ve made on clean, domestic energy.” 

But it’s a misplaced bet.  The PTC actually blocks the green energy technologies that hold the most promise.  Rather than helping an infant industry, the PTC is a handout to Wall Street. 

 

Congress created the PTC in 1992, a tax credit of roughly 2 cents per kilowatt-hour of wind electricity, to nurture the infant wind energy industry. Government incentives to promote crucial industries are time-honored. That’s not the problem with the PTC.

What’s important is that only big investors who want to offset tax liabilities on other investments need apply. The PTC can only be taken against “passive income” – income from other investments. Private equity firms put together investors who need a tax write-off courtesy of the PTC. Warren Buffett admits he uses the PTC to lower his Berkshire taxes: “we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them.”

The PTC doesn’t help the average Joe who wants to put a small wind turbine on his ranch to generate electricity and reduce the taxes he pays on his farm income.  

But while the PTC boosts Wall Street investment schemes in large-scale wind farms, the fact is small-scale, individually owned generation facilities hold the most promise for renewable energy.

Noted environmentalist Bill McKibben writes, “One of the great side effects of moving to renewable power is that we will replace vulnerable, brittle centralized systems that are too big to fail with spread out democratic energy sources.” Unfortunately, the PTC only encourages more “brittle centralized systems.”

California’s Local Clean Energy Alliance (which includes the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Sierra Club) concurs. It’s report, Community Power, states “local, decentralized generation of electricity offers many benefits to California’s communities relative to large central-station solar or wind power plants in remote areas.”

The Institute for Local Self Reliance, a green energy cheerleader, says renewables work best “at small scales across the country,” what’s known as distributed generation, “a network of independently-owned and widely dispersed renewable energy generators” rather than “a 20th century grid dominated by large, centralized utilities.”

In fact the Institute explicitly says the PTC is a significant barrier to greater investment in renewable energy. Removing this barrier “makes smaller projects more accessible to the local community, and draws local investors back into the process,” says John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Utilities are also taking local-scale renewable energy seriously.  A report by the Edison Electric Institute, Disruptive Challenges expects small-scale solar and wind “to challenge and transform the electric utility industry” with “adverse impacts on revenues, as well as on investor returns.”

David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, a wholesale power company that operates coal-fired plants, told Blooomberg Businessweek  “the grid will become increasingly irrelevant as customers move toward decentralized homegrown green energy.”

So, if local-scale wind and solar generated close to the end user makes the most sense, why do we have a PTC pushing large-scale wind farms? It’s a Wall Street play.

Environmentalists supporting the PTC mean well, but they fail to see the wolf of Wall Street hiding beneath the green clothes. Ironically, the national green organizations are fighting for the kind of massive generating stations and power lines their local chapters often fight against. 

The PTC is an anachronism and an obstacle to developing the decentralized, independently owned power generation system appropriate for wind, solar and other renewables.

Anyone who believes in renewable energy should be happy to see the PTC expire. It’s time to replace this tax write-off for the financial services cabal with something that benefits everyone. 

Ellis is executive director of the American Jobs Alliance.

Wind and Solar….Novelty Energy Forms, That We Can’t Afford!

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The Economist: Wind and solar power are even more expensive than is commonly thought

What global warming polar bear 3

No kidding.

Via the Economist

Quote

…Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy.

…To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.

If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.

There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy.