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American politics
Tales of Wind Turbine Torture….NOT a Bedtime Story!
Curt Devlin: Details a Decade of Turbine Torture
June 6, 2015 by
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Curt Devlin hales from Fairhaven, Massachusetts U.S.A. He was formerly a Teaching Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Tulane University. He revved up against the great wind power fraud back in 2007, when a wind power outfit set out to spear a clutch of giant fans into the undisturbed and ecologically sensitive salt marshes surrounding a quite estuary in the Little Bay area of Fairhaven – an area bordered by densely populated neighborhoods. Although this project was defeated, construction began on the sly, starting on Veteran’s Day in November of 2011.
Since then, Devlin been an outspoken critic of the wind industry and its proponents. He’s written numerous articles and editorials on this and related topics. He has been a guest speaker at the Fairhaven Wind Forum in 2012, where he criticized the irresponsible siting of turbines in residential neighborhoods across Massachusetts and around the world.
In 2013, he spoke on the fundamental human right to be free of unwarranted experimentation at the Falmouth Human Rights Conference in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Professionally, Devlin works as a software architect focused on the development of health science solutions for the detection and treatment of cancer and the improvement of human health.
Here’s Curt detailing a decade-long, unnecessary nightmare.
June 1 Ten Years Massachusetts Wind Turbine Torture
Friends Against Wind
Curt Devlin
1 June 2015
“People are willing to tolerate, approve, and contribute to the torture of their neighbors with the ill effects of wind turbines simply because they have been told by public officials, the media, or green zealots that it is necessary to ‘save the planet’ from global climate change.”
It is easy to forget just how essential sleep is to health and happiness; until of course, you yourself have been deprived of it for a night or two. Firsthand experience of sleep deprivation, even for a few days, is a powerful reminder of how mentally and physically debilitating it is. Even the ongoing disruption or restriction of sleep for a relatively short period of time can have devastating health consequences. Medical research has clearly shown that sleep is essential to human health and wellbeing. Prolonged sleep deprivation has been linked to memory loss, hallucination, weakened resistance to pain, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, impaired immune response, extreme anxiety, stress, clinical depression, and suicide. In the most extreme cases, animal experimentation suggests that lack of sleep can kill you.
Sleep deprivation has long been recognized as torture by the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the United Nations Convention against Torture (CAT), and the United States War Crimes Act. Depriving someone of proper sleep is torture, regardless of whether it is perpetrated by the CIA against suspected terrorists, OR by reckless planning authorities who permit the wind industry to site industrial-scale wind turbines in residential neighborhoods, or by noise pollution regulatory authorities and health authorities who ignore consistent reports of sleep deprivation from neighboring residents. When authorities deem developments “compliant” with regulations, or wind developers effect specious mitigations; they are inflicting torture. They are violating fundamental human rights.
Recently, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released what has come to be known as the Torture Report. It reveals that sleep deprivation was one of the frequently used CIA “enhanced interrogation” tactics. The use of prolonged sleep deprivation led Committee Chairman, Diane Feinstein to conclude “…that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured.” She goes on to say “…that the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized and unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel, inhuman, and degrading.” The same can be said of the practice of siting industrial turbines too close to homes. Failure to take action to stop excessive noise pollution, or to enforce existing legal limits on “noise nuisance” whenever noise-induced sleep disturbance or deprivation is reported by wind turbine neighbors, hosts, or their families is full complicity with torture.
It is grimly ironic that the US Senate Committee condemns sleep deprivation as cruel and inhuman when used by the CIA interrogators on terror suspects, but blithely ignores it when imposed by wind developers and local authorities on ordinary, law-abiding citizens who pose no threat to anyone. The only threat they pose is to the income generated by taxpayer subsidies to unscrupulous wind developers.
Is it really fair to compare the torture of detainees to that of turbine neighbors? Consider that the detainees were forced to endure sleeplessness for a few days at a time on many occasions, but never more than a week. Wind turbine victims must endure this same deprivation for arbitrary periods of time whenever the wind is blowing, sometimes intermittently for decades. Often, their only hope of escape or reprieve from this torment is to flee their homes which no one will buy—despite the fact that they are not suspected of any crimes whatsoever. At least detainees were not forced to lie awake and watch their families suffer the same deprivation.
When the turbines were shut down during a winter storm with near hurricane-force winds, one young mother of infant twins living in Fairhaven, Massachusetts USA wrote “Isn’t it crazy that in a weird twist it takes a blizzard to give us peace. According to the power dash the beasts stopped at around 9PM.” Later on, she wrote, “I sleep ok in the basement but the babies still wake up randomly almost every night.” Most who are tortured by turbines will tell you that “the beast” can usually finds them even when they are hiding in the cellar. Not only are people kept awake by the turbines, but they must endure headaches, nausea, dizziness, breathing difficulties, and in some cases uncontrollable anxiety and severe acute depression.
In one incident described in the Torture Report, an Afghani named Arsala Khan “…suffered disturbing hallucinations after 56 hours of standing sleep deprivation….” Afterwards, the CIA determined that he actually was not involved in any plans or activities to harm the U.S! The innocent victims tortured by the wind industry are in a position to know just how it feels to be tortured indiscriminately.
Publicly, the Bush administration and the CIA chose to describe their treatment of detainees as “enhanced interrogation.” The wind industry chooses to call its noise impact mere “annoyance” and refer to residents’ “concerns”. These euphemisms are carefully selected to conceal the ugly reality that sleep deprivation is torture, plain and simple. Such terms attempt to hide what is known to be—by any standard of human decency—utterly wrong and depraved. The Senate Intelligence Committee and others have begun to shine a spotlight on the CIA torture program; but the wind industry program of cruelty continues to operate with impunity, largely beyond the glare of public scrutiny.
When the US Senate Committee report placed the issue of torture front and center in the media, it prompted outrage among some journalists, who have used terms like ‘depravity,’ ‘harrowing,’ and ‘gruesome’ to describe the techniques used by the CIA. Yet the media has no outrage when prolonged sleep deprivation and cruelties are routinely visited on local neighborhoods throughout America and across the world. When the subject turns to wind turbines, all talk of human rights violations immediately goes silent.
Remarkably, and despite the condemnation of the Intelligence Committee and the outraged media reaction to it, public opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans still consider the CIA’s use of torture justified. Even those who disagree with this view, may be able to understand it. The rationale for torture is that it was necessary to prevent another 911; but what, then, is the rationale for torturing ordinary men, women, and children in their own homes on a nightly basis? What accounts for the almost universal apathy of government officials, mainstream media, and the general public, toward the victims of wind energy? It seems America is one nation, with liberty, and justice for all—except for those unlucky few, who can be tortured without any good cause at all. Our silence gives consent to continue.
Perhaps this silence about turbine victims can be partially explained by a monumental form of social denial. Psychologists have noted that when confronted with tacit complicity with torture, most people tend to diminish in their own minds the actual harm being inflicted. Terms like ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘annoyance’ encourage such forms of self-deception. However, this pervasive complicity with torture cannot be fully explained by denial alone. There is a far more ominous and compelling explanation supplied long ago by the experiments of Stanley Milgram.
In 1962, Milgram, a Harvard-trained psychologist, devised a set of experiments designed to explain why people are willing to accept and even participate in torture. Initially, Milgram thought it was a lack of moral fiber. Prior to conducting his experiments, Milgram believed that most Americans were morally superior to those who were responsible for the torture and atrocities of the Holocaust. He predicted that most of his (American) subjects would reject the use of torture out of hand. Milgram also polled many of his fellow psychologists, who made similar predictions. Contrary to all expectations, however, Milgram’s experiment actually proved that about two thirds of Americans were willing to administer torture by electroshock to innocent victims, even to the point of possible lethality, simply because they were told by someone in a position of perceived authority that it was necessary to do so. Contrary to the much beloved American mythology of rugged individualism and personal independence, Milgram has shown that most Americans are just as blindly obedient to authority as everyone else.
Since that time, Milgram’s experiment has been repeated dozens of times by him and other scientists, with subjects from different counties and cultures, but the results are always the same. About 65% of all subjects are willing to administer torture—even to the point of lethality—as long as someone in authority tells them it is necessary. Even when controls are added to identify potentially confounding factors, this result is highly repeatable. This shows that obedience to authority, even to the point of partaking in torture of innocent victims, is so deeply ingrained in human nature that it transcends language, culture, and moral outlook—it is a truly global phenomenon. The evidence for this is sadly pervasive.
People are willing to ignore, condone, and even participate in torturing detainees simply because they are told that it was necessary to protect America from new terrorist attacks. Similarly, people are willing to tolerate, approve, and contribute to the torture of their neighbors with the ill effects of wind turbines simply because they have been told by public officials, the media, or green zealots that it is necessary to “save the planet” from global climate change. There is ample evidence to show that torture is not an effective means of interrogation and that industrial wind turbines cannot stem climate change. No matter. Like subjects in Milgram’s experiment, the public is being told by authority that “the experiment requires that you continue.”
In a position paper entitled Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and Human Rights First (HRF) have collaborated to publish a detailed condemnation of the CIA torture program, as well as the participation of physicians in these practices. Section 6 specifically details the physical harm and health consequences of forced sleep deprivation and interruption. It also delineates the criminal consequences for anyone who knowingly engages in it. Here it is pointed out that “the U.S. State Department has condemned Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey for using sleep deprivation as a form of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”
In case anyone is inclined to minimize sleep deprivation as mere annoyance, as the wind industry and its advocates would have you believe; Leave No Marks goes on to note that:
Even sleep restriction of four hours per night for less than a week can result in physical harm, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, altered glucose tolerance and insulin resistance. Sleep deprivation can impair immune function and result in increased risk of infectious diseases. Further, chronic pain syndromes are associated with alterations in sleep continuity and sleep patterns.
Many of those who are routinely awakened by nearby industrial turbines would consider themselves lucky to get even four consecutive hours of uninterrupted sleep on a regular basis. This paper notes that U.S. federal courts have found that sleep deprivation is also a violation of the Eight Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Perhaps it is time for groups like Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First and indeed the medical profession generally, to turn their intention toward the ongoing torture and cruelty perpetrated by the wind industry. Surely, such acts are criminal whether they are committed by governments or private industry.
Dr. William Hallstein, treating psychiatrist from Falmouth USA, made it abundantly clear that the impacts of the turbines are indeed tantamount to torture in his letter to the Falmouth Town Board of Health. It is telling that Justice Muse from the Falmouth Superior Court issued an injunction in December 2013 to prevent “irreparable harm to physical and psychological health” by turning the turbines off at night. The turbines at Falmouth (USA) remain turned off, over a year later.
Perhaps it’s time to face our own complicity and involvement in these fundamental violations of both civil and human rights, as well.
The wind industry cannot hide behind a claim of ignorance about the devastating impact of wind turbine noise on human health. N.D. Kelley and other NASA scientists from the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) have published papers that ascribe the direct causation of human disturbance to wind turbine noise. This group published numerous papers on this subject between 1982 and 1985 based on sound research and clear evidence. Then, in 1987, this research was presented directly to the wind industry at the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) Conference in San Francisco. In short, the wind industry has continued to site its industrial scale power and noise generators near residential neighborhoods for more than thirty years, knowing full well that it was inflicting cruelty and suffering on those living near them. The silence of public officials, the media, and the public indicates wind turbine torture may be allowed to continue for decades to come.
There can be no doubt that wind turbines cause chronic sleep deprivation, and no doubt that sleep deprivation is torture. The scientific evidence that turbines do cause sleeplessness is already prolific and continues to grow. Moreover, the most comprehensive literature reviews on this question reveal that there is virtually no independent evidence to controvert this conclusion. Perhaps the most damning evidence of all comes from the public record of heath complaints from people around the world. According to the noted epidemiologist Carl V. Phillips, “There is overwhelming evidence that large electricity-generating wind turbines (hereafter: turbines) cause serious health problems in a nontrivial fraction of residents living near them.” Among these public health reports from turbine neighbors, sleep deprivation and disruption are by far the most common.
Taken together, the science and the public record of adverse health reports offer clear and compelling evidence that wind turbines are instruments of torture. Therefore, anyone who advocates for, or participates in, the siting of wind turbines near people is inflicting torture on them. Anyone who contributes to, or endorses, unsafe government noise pollution regulations, or who allows them to continue unabated when turbines are clearly causing sleep deprivation and other forms of human misery, or who ignores community complaints, or obstructs the accurate measurement of infrasound and low frequency noise inside homes is complicit with torture. And, anyone who knowingly conducts spurious turbine noise mitigations, or who permits or helps to perpetuate levels of infrasound and low frequency noise emissions above the thresholds established by Dr. Neil Kelley, and confirmed most recently by Steven Cooper’s research at Cape Bridgewater in Australia, must be held accountable for inflicting, or helping to perpetuate torture by prolonged sleep deprivation. Those who do so are guilty of criminal violation of both civil and human rights on an industrial scale.
This is why the global wind industry has strategically and systematically sought to silence wind turbine hosts and neighbors with property buy-outs and non-disclosure agreements. Undoubtedly, this is also why they and those who support them have publicly targeted acoustic engineers, health practitioners, and public health experts who have attempted to expose this truth in accordance with their canons of professional ethics. This industry subjects legitimate science to ridicule, its authors to character assassination, and its sleepless victims to blame and aspersions of mental defect. All of this is done to cloak conscious criminal cruelty in the name of unbridled greed.
In its determination to hide the ugly reality of industrial wind turbines, this industry uses money and the false promise of cheap energy to exert undue influence over public officials. It substitutes pseudo-science for legitimate science, spends untold millions on PR campaigns to drown out honest journalism, and sponsors fear-mongering in place of reasoned public discourse on renewable energy.
There may be no better evidence for this campaign of pubic deception than the so-called “Wind Turbine Health Impact Study: Report of Independent Expert Panel” produced in January, 2012 by an unholy alliance between the wind industry and Massachusetts governor’s office. This document epitomizes the fraudulence, distortion, and misinformation that flourish when wind industry influence over government goes unchecked by public scrutiny and legal safeguards. The title notwithstanding, none of the authors of this so-called health study had any recognized expertise related to the health effects of wind turbines. None had ever given a physical examination to a turbine sufferer, and no turbine-related health complaints were investigated during the course of this study—despite the vocal and repeated pleas by effected residents to be examined as part of it. Although insufficient peer-review was one of the most salient criticism leveled against the legitimate studies reviewed; the Massachusetts study itself was not submitted to peer-review before its publication. For these and other reasons, it was deemed junk science by Dr. Raymond Hartmann, who is widely recognized for his expertise in analyzing scientific evidence, and exposing the junk science used by the Tobacco industry to defend its products.
The “Expert Panel” study was published by the Massachusetts Departments of Environmental Protection and Public Health. When such junk science such as this is published by the very agencies responsible for protecting the environment and public health, it gives them the ring of authority. It is as though the state has mandated to an unsuspecting public that the torture must continue. In Milgram’s experiment, when a subject refused to continue administering shocks, the authority figure would reassure them by saying something to the effect that no permanent tissue damage will be caused. In that context, the statement was quite true because no real shock was actually being given. But in the case of wind turbines, government sanctioned torture is very real and does real damage to health and safety—and that damage may indeed be permanent. As the epigraph from Leave No Marks reminds us, “The absence of physical evidence should not be construed to suggest that torture did not occur, since such acts of violence against persons frequently leave no marks or permanent scars.”
For those who are willing to face their own conscience, there may be a glimmer of hope in Stanley Milgram’s otherwise bleak findings. In some of his later experiments, Milgram tried to determine how conformity would affect the obedience of the experimental subjects. He found that when at least two others in the room refused to comply with authority, only about 10% of the experimental subjects were willing to continue torturing. For those who have the courage to defy authority, it seems that disobedience can be contagious, and raising your voice loudly, publicly, and repeatedly against indiscriminant torture and injustice can truly make a difference.
Friends against wind
Stop the Subsidies, and the Windweasels will Scurry Away!
Texans Move to Slam Wind Power Subsidies
June 1, 2015 by
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The great wind power fraud is in meltdown around the globe.
In the US, ‘wind power’ states have cut their state based subsidies to wind power outfits (or are well on the path of doing so); and Republicans are out to prevent the extension of the Federal government’s PTC wind power subsidy:
2015: the Wind Industry’s ‘Annus Horribilis’; or Time to Sink the Boots In
US Republicans Line Up to Can Subsidies for Wind Power
In Texas, the great wind power fraud launched off with a frenzy of construction, a decade ago. Thousands of giant fans were speared all over West Texas (mostly in the North). However, with the demand for power centred to the South-East in Dallas and Houston, they spent nearly $7 billion on wind driven grid capacity expansion (see our post here).
But, as everywhere, the wind industry is long on its insatiable demand for an endless stream of massive subsidies, but short on delivery of anything more than empty promises. In Texas, that familiar tale brought the retort from its Comptroller, Susan Combs that it was time for wind power outfits to put up or shut up:
Texas Blames Wind Power Slump on (you guessed it) … the Wind
Now, the Lone Star State’s Legislators have cried “enough is enough”, with its Senate voting to scrap its State-based wind power subsidy, in a move that spells the beginning of the end for BIG WIND in Texas.
Texas Moves to Abolish Renewable Energy Mandates (but much damage has been done)
Master Resource
Josiah Neeley
29 April 2015
“With Texas wind power capacity at more than double the state’s RPS minimum, repeal is unlikely to do much to change the profile of renewable energy in Texas. But repeal is still important, because it sends a clear signal that markets, not politics, should decide what kinds of energy Texans use.”
Texas has always been big on energy. The state’s long history of oil and gas production is well known. And on the electric generation side, Texas ranks first in the nation for nuclear power and has the most installed wind capacity of any state.
While the willingness to develop our energy potential is unrivaled, the means has not always been the best. Like in other states, and the U.S. as a whole, Texas has periodically tried to prop up or hold back different forms of energy via special protections, subsidies, or mandates, rather than letting markets and the price system decide the best energy mix.
That’s why recent events at the state capitol are so interesting. Earlier this month, the Texas Senate voted to repeal the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, as well as some related subsidies to the wind industry. If passed by the House and signed into law, the move could signal a broader change in how lawmakers treat energy in the U.S.
How We Got Here
Texas first created its Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) as a sweetener to the 1999 legislation introduction of electrical competition. The initial mandate required the state’s competitive electric providers to cumulatively install 2,000 MW of new renewable energy capacity by 2009. Individual companies were responsible for a portion of the total proportionate to their overall share of the competitive electrical market, and could meet their requirement either directly (by building the capacity themselves) or indirectly (by purchasing credits from other producers).
Once in place, the RPS mandate inevitably grew (what Milton Friedman calls the tyranny of the status quo). In 2005, the Texas legislature expanded the RPS to require 10,000 MW of installed capacity from renewables by 2025.
The legislature also acted to deal with a geographical inconvenience: Most of Texas’ wind capacity was in the sparsely populated west, while our electrical demand is centered in urban areas hundreds of miles to the east. In response, the legislature created the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone (CREZ), to build a thousand miles of transmission line to link wind farms with urban demand (to solve the nowhere-to-somewhere problem).
These programs have been costly for Texas. Transmission lines under the CREZ program have cost nearly $7 billion, or $270 per Texan. The cost of transmission lines is socialized across all electrical consumers, and will start appearing on Texans’ utility bills in the near future. Costs of meeting the RPS have been lower, but still have been estimated at approximately$543 million since 2005.
Blown Away
Yet upon close analysis, these programs appear to have achieved very little. Texas met the 10,000 MW target for installed renewable capacity in 2010, a full 15 years ahead of the deadline, suggesting that the RPS itself was not the major factor. And the CREZ lines are only now being completed.
If Texas’ RPS wasn’t responsible for the big increase in wind capacity, what was? Answer: federal subsidies.
The federal Production Tax Credit, which provided up to $22 per MWh for renewable energy generation, dwarfed any effect of Texas’ RPS. The PTC was so generous that wind generators would often bid electricity onto the grid at a negative price (i.e. they pay you to take it) just to be eligible for the subsidy.
Needless to say, this posed some serious challenges to the long-term reliability of the Texas electrical grid. It has also compromised the economics of conventional sources of power such as gas-fired power plants and even nuclear plants.
Texas’ RPS, more than realized, was an exercise in political symbolism. The costs were real, but the main benefit was that it allowed the state to take a share of credit for the expanding use of wind energy, as explained by Kenneth Anderson Jr. of the Texas Public Utility Commission in the appendix below.
A New Direction
The value of that symbolism appears to be changing. The federal government began phasing out the PTC at the end of 2013 and is currently looking at ways to reform the federal Renewable Fuel Standard.
And here in Texas, there is a growing sense that programs like the RPS and CREZ outlived their usefulness (if they were ever useful to begin with). Wind, in particular, has been the recipient of billions in subsidies over the course of several decades. If the technology can’t survive on its own by now, there’s no reason to think that a few more years of subsidies would change that.
Even if the CREZ program is repealed, Texans will still be paying the cost of these projects for years to come. With Texas wind at more than double the state’s RPS minimum, repeal is unlikely to do much to change the profile of renewable energy in Texas wither. But repeal is still important, because it sends a clear signal that markets, not politics, should decide what kinds of energy Texans use.
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Appendix: Texas Public Utility Commissioner Kenneth Anderson [1]
EnergyWire: After a [Texas] PUC report to lawmakers, bills have been moving forward on possibly scrapping a renewable energy standard and specifying commission oversight of certain direct-current (DC) ties to ERCOT. Some people are pretty upset, particularly on the renewable one (EnergyWire, April 14).
Anderson: I think their concerns are way overstated. … To be clear, we’re still counting renewable energy credits. We wanted to make sure that that continues to happen because it is the way that load-serving entities distinguish products. …
We just felt that there was no real reason to continue to have a mandatory purchase program because … we blew past our target years ago.
EnergyWire: A wind coalition has said the value of some credits could be affected.
Anderson: Will the price be affected slightly? It is possible, but I’m not sure why we should be continuing to have a mandatory program.
EnergyWire: Some environmental groups say Texas would be sending a bad message.
Anderson: How long do you have to subsidize something before it’s finally grown up? … We spent $7 billion to build out a transmission system that doesn’t cost them anything so that it would facilitate their interconnection to the grid. That is an ongoing and continuing, basically, social subsidy. …
Wind does not have to meet a schedule. They’re just a price-taker. ERCOT schedules the wind effectively first, you know, absent constraints on the system. … But, all things being equal, wind gets a free pass from the obligation to meet a schedule. So that in itself is a huge incentive.
[1] Source: Edward Klump, “From renewables to the grid, regulator seeks to keep Texas on its own path,” EnergyWire (E&E News), April 28, 2015 (subscription required).
Master Resource
The Texan’s retreat contrasts with the ridiculous push by Tony Abbott’s (conservative?) Coalition to carpet Australia’s countryside with 2,500 more giant fans. A “plan” which is backed by his $46 billion electricity tax on all Australian power consumers – a punitive and regressive tax, the entire proceeds of which is designed to be funneled off to outfits likenear-bankrupt Infigen as a whopping $3 billion a year subsidy that runs over the horizon, until 2031 (see our post here).
Note though, that Australia is in about the same position as Texas was in 2005, when it had no grid capacity to take power from its planned fan-expansion program. The missing grid had to built for no other purpose than taking wind power from North to South, as noted above. In:
2005 the Texas Legislature approved a major transmission project, the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ), to carry mostly wind energy generated in West Texas and the Panhandle to high-demand cities. The project was forecast to cost less than $5 billion but ballooned to more than $6.9 billion to build nearly 3,600 miles of transmission lines and dozens of substations.
As pointed out in the piece above, in part, it’s that whopping cost that has legislators in Texas pulling the plug on subsidies for wind power, in an effort to protect power consumers from ballooning power bills.
In Australia, as we’ve pointed out a few times (see our posts here andhere), there simply is no (or insufficient) capacity to absorb the 17,000 GWh of intermittent wind power (needed each year to satisfy the latest 33,000 GWh LRET annual target) that can – like Texas – only be built in areas altogether remote from major population centres and markets.
Here, however, grid operators have absolutely no incentive to throw $billions at building transmission lines, substations etc running to the back-of-beyond, to take power delivered at crazy, random intervals which – apart from the REC Subsidy that comes with it – has no commercial value at all. The REC Subsidy goes to wind power outfits, not grid operators – and wind power outfits pay nothing to use the grid – that’s a cost that’s extracted by retailers from their dwindling pool of retail customers (see our posts here and here).
And, grid operators in Australia have just been prevented by the Australian Energy Regulator from recovering hundreds of $millions in network infrastructure costs – making the chances of them throwing any more at transmission lines slimmer than a German Supermodel. Why invest a penny, when a regulator is going to prevent you from getting anything like the whole return on that investment back?
Australia’s ‘lack’ of grid infrastructure is just another insurmountable obstacle for an industry in its death throes; and a guarantee that the LRET will go to penalty – with the inevitable imposition of the $65 per MWh shortfall charge.
That charge – which (carpeting the) Environment (in giant fans) Minister Greg Hunt refers to as his “massive $93 per tonne carbon tax” – will see all Australian power consumers end up paying more than $20 billion in fines; on top of the $25 billion that will go as subsidies (in the form of RECs) to wind power outfits.
In their constant need for massive subsidies – that’ll have to outlast religion in order for them to survive – the behaviour of wind power outfits the world over is just like Disney’s doyen of eternal youth – Peter Pan: the boy who could never grow up.
This Is A Good Start, But World-Wide Reforms Needed!
Robson: Good winds blowing
Credit: By Frank Robson, Guest Columnist | The Journal Record | May 29, 2015 | journalrecord.com ~~
I applaud the Oklahoma Legislature and Gov. Mary Fallin for implementing much-needed reform of the wind industry, addressing both excessive subsidies and lack of regulation for protection of property owners. The progress made this year is important in establishing a regulatory framework. Yet there is still work to do.
Senate Bill 808 by state Sen. Brian Bingman, R-Sapulpa, and Rep. Earl Sears, R-Bartlesville, signed by Fallin on April 17, established a 1.5-nautical-mile setback of wind turbines from schools, airports and hospitals and provides a stronger decommissioning statute that protects landowners and taxpayers from being financially responsible for taking down turbines at the end of their life. The legislation also requires notification to landowners at least six months before construction begins.
The new law doesn’t take into consideration protection of wind turbines from homes, neighborhoods, public parks and other land where natural habitat may be disturbed. We hope the Legislature will consider the need for further requirements that address reasonable restrictions on the placement of wind turbines near other areas of public safety concern.
Senate Bill 498 by state Sen. Mike Mazzei, R-Tulsa, and Sears, signed May 20, repeals the ability of the wind industry to qualify for a five-year property tax exemption. This provides a good start in addressing the magnitude of industrial wind’s subsidies and negative impact on Oklahoma’s budget.
Senate Bill 502 by state Sen. Marty Quinn, R-Claremore, and Sears, signed May 20, repeals the ability of the wind industry to qualify for the new jobs investment tax credit effective Jan. 1, 2017. This eliminates an unnecessary and potentially costly subsidy for an industry that creates few jobs here.
Wind developers may still qualify for zero-emission tax credits, which amount to $5 per megawatt-hour for all electricity produced from industrial wind facilities for 10 years. The current law saddles Oklahoma taxpayers with this burden for all wind facilities built prior to Jan. 1, 2021. Payment of subsidies under this program may extend until Dec. 31, 2030.
We look forward to continued forthright discussions with state leadership regarding the need for further safety regulations, and the need to evaluate the legitimacy of the remaining subsidies available to industrial wind. Let’s continue to make progress for the betterment of Oklahoma.
Frank Robson is a member of the Oklahoma Property Rights Association.
Climate Change Scare, is nothing but a tool, for Wealth Redistribution….
UN Negotiating Text For Climate Agreement Opens Up Gravy Train
How the UN is ‘breaking bad’ with U.S. taxpayer money.In December the United Nations will convene in Paris, for the purpose of hammering out an international agreement on climate change. Reaching an agreement has become a“legacy issue” for President Obama, and his administration is devoting enormous resources towards the successful completion of this task.
In March the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change distributed draft language to serve as options for the agreement that may be decided in December. In a previous IER post I showed how the two climate change goals adopted in the UN text could not be justified, using the UN’s own scientific reports, and how the draft language opened the doors to massive international bureaucracies.
In this post I’ll focus specifically on the enormous wealth transfers from rich to poor countries that are being proposed in the draft—as high as annual transfers in excess of $100 billion from the United States alone, according to some of the language.
To be sure, at this stage these ludicrous suggestions are merely a “wish list,” but average Americans should realize just how much of their money will be on the buffet line when the UN delegates meet in December. In November President Obama already pledged $3 billion for such efforts, and the new UN proposal shows how much more the most zealous advocates have in mind.
The UN’s $100 Billion+ Bonanza
Anyone with the stamina to click on the link and skim through the UN’s draft language will see that the 90-page document is very redundant. However, the following excerpt gives a good sampling of a theme reiterated throughout:
- [Scale of resources provided by developed country Parties shall be based on a percentage of their GNP of at least (X per cent) taking into consideration the following:
- The provision of finance to be based on a floor of USD 100 billion per year, and shall take into account the different assessment of climate-related finance needs prepared by the secretariat and reports by other international organizations;
- Based on an ex ante process to commit quantified support relative to the required effort and in line with developing countries’ needs… [UNFCCC Negotiating Text, p. 43]
Later on, in section 96, the document states, “a. Developed country Parties to provide 1 per cent of gross domestic product per year from 2020 and additional funds during the pre-2020 period to the GCF [Green Climate Fund]…” (bold added).
Thus we see that this negotiating text contains more than a simple pledge for various countries to cap their emissions—it also includes enormous transfers of money from rich to developing countries. If the particular suggestion quoted above from section 96 were to be implemented, it would entail some $175 billion annually in transfers from Americans (because U.S. GDP is currently above $17.5 trillion). Note that this is in addition to conventional foreign aid programs—the UN document makes that clear, elsewhere. The sole (ostensible) purpose of these dedicated funds is to help poorer countries deal with climate change. The recipient countries will no doubt be quite creative in justifying all sorts of infrastructure and other spending projects necessary to combat climate change.
Now, a reasonable reader might think, “Well, supposing the ‘pause’ in global warming continues, they’d probably scale back the funds needed for adaptation, right?” But such common sense would be mistaken. On page 22 of the document we learn that “since adaptation efforts will need to be undertaken far in advance of the temperature rise,” therefore “planning for adaptation and undertaking adaptation should be based on an evaluation of temperature scenarios that are expected to result from particular levels of mitigation action…”
In other words, the authors of this proposed treaty language want the transfer spigot turned on with no accountability. So long as they can point to future damages that occur inside a computer simulation, the United States and other wealthy countries will be expected to cough up billions of dollars to fight the computer-projected threat of future climate change damage.
Already, the Green Climate Fund is beefing up staff, with openings ranging from “gender social specialist” to“marketing consultant” whose duties include “helping to shape the brand of the fund.” It is quite clear from the bureaucratic progress of the Green Climate Fund that they mean business (of some kind) and are counting on the money to fund their multiple activities.
Conclusion
The UN has released the Negotiating Text of the possible treaty that may come out of talks in Paris in December. Americans should familiarize themselves with the main items contained in this document. In a previous IER post I showed that the UN document adopts climate change goals that the UN’s own reports can’t justify, and furthermore would create a huge new international bureaucracy.
In the present post, I quoted from the document to show the desire to fund these unaccountable extra-national organizations with an enormous flow of money taken from rich countries. Although the demands are so ludicrous that they should be viewed as a “wish list,” it is nonetheless instructive—and alarming—to see just how expensive they could be. According to one idea contained in the text that the UN has released, the U.S. would be expected to contribute more than $175 billion annually into the giant pot of money. President Obama in November already pledged $3 billion to such an effort. How far do Americans want to go along?
Green/Greed Energy….Long Past it’s “Best Before” date……
Goodbye, Green Energy
The green energy movement in America is dead. May it rest in peace.
No, a majority of American energy over the next 20 years is not going to come from windmills and solar panels. One important lesson to be learned from the green energy fad’s rapid and expensive demise is that central planning doesn’t work.
What crushed green energy was the boom in shale oil and gas, along with the steep decline in the price of fossil fuel that few saw coming just a few years ago.
A new International Energy Agency report concedes that green energy is in fast retreat and is getting crushed by “the recent drop in fossil fuel prices.” It finds that the huge price advantage for oil and natural gas means “fossil plants still dominate recent (electric power) capacity additions.”
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Most of the government experts – and many private investors, too – bought into the “peak oil” nonsense and the forecasts of fuel prices continuing to rise as we depleted the oil from the earth’s crust.
Oil was expected to stay way over $100 a barrel and potentially soon hit $200 a barrel. National Geographic infamously advertised on its cover in 2004: “The End of Cheap Oil.”
President Barack Obama told voters that green energy was necessary because oil is a “finite resource” and we would eventually run out. Apparently, Mr. Obama never read The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon which teaches us that human ingenuity in finding new resources outpaces resource depletion.
When fracking and horizontal drilling technologies burst onto the scene, U.S. oil and gas reserves nearly doubled almost overnight. Oil production from 2007-2014 grew by more than 70 percent and natural gas production by nearly 30 percent.
The shale revolution is a classic disruptive technology advance that has priced the Green Movement out of the competitive market. Natural gas isn’t $13; it is now close to $3, an 80 percent decline. Oil prices have fallen by nearly half.
Green energy can’t possibly compete with that. Marketing windpower in an environment of $3 natural gas is like trying to sell sand in the Sahara. Instead of letting the green energy fad die a merciful death, the Obama administration only lavished more subsidies on the Solyndras of the world.
Washington suffered from what F.A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit.” Like the 1950s central planners in the Politburo, Congress and the White House thought they knew where the future was headed.
According to a 2015 report by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, over the past 5 years, the U.S. government spent $150 billion on “solar power and other renewable energy projects.” Even with fracking changing the energy world, these blindfolded sages stuck with their wild green-eyed fantasy that wind turbines were the future.
Meanwhile, the return of $2.50 a gallon gasoline at the pump is flattening the battery car market. A recent report from the trade publication Fusion notes: “electric vehicle purchases in the U.S. have stagnated. According to auto analysts at Edmunds.com, only 45 percent of this year’s hybrid and EV trade-ins have gone toward the purchase of another alternative fuel vehicle. That’s down from just over 60 percent in 2012.”
Edmunds.com says that “never before have loyalty rates for alt-fuel vehicles fallen below 50 percent” and it speculated that “many hybrid and EV owners are driven more by financial motives rather than a responsibility to the environment.”
That’s what happens when the world is awash in cheap fossil fuels.
This isn’t the first time American taxpayers have been fleeced by false green energy dreams. In the late 1970s the Carter administration spent billions of dollars on the Synthetic Fuels Corporation which was going to produce fuel economically and competitively.
Solar and wind power were also brief flashes in the pan. It all crash landed by 1983 when oil prices crashed to as low as $20 a barrel after Reagan deregulated energy. The SFC was one of the great corporate welfare boondogggles in American history.
A lesson should have been learned there, but Washington went all in again under Presidents Bush and Obama. At least private sector investors have lost their own money in these foolish bets on bringing back energy sources from the Middle Ages like wind turbines.
The tragedy of government as venture capitalist is that the politicians lose OUR money. These government-backed technologies divert private capital away from potentially more promising innovations.
Harold Hamm, president of Continental, and one of the discoverers of the Bakken Shale in North Dakota tells the story of meeting with Obama at the White House in 2010 to tell him of the fracking revolution. Mr. Obama arrogantly responded that electric cars would soon replace fossil fuels. Was he ever wrong.
We don’t know if renewables will ever play a significant role in America’s energy mix. But if it does ever happen, it will be a result of market forces, not central planning.
*Stephen Moore is a distinguished visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Father of Green Communities Act, Convicted Under the RICO Act! Who’s Next?
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)
POINTMAN – Always Gives Us Something to Ponder….
A friend once turned to me on a day that had no mercy in it and said, “you’re right, there is no God.” We were both watching something slowly unfolding, something cold and just petrifying cruel which couldn’t be stopped by either of us. We couldn’t exert any control over it, we could only watch; emasculated observers at the final end of world extinction event of any residual hope about how low us human beings could really get. Pop, there they go, pop, pop, another couple of the buggers. Pop, pop, and poppety pop and yet a few more of them. At the time and in a vague distracted sort of way, it broke my heart to see him lose his faith, because I loved him as only one man can love another and I’d always somehow relied on him to be the last unwavering believer in some sort of floor of decency that none of us could ever drop through, though I’d never quite realised that until that moment. It was a sort of good-natured buddy buddy routine we did. I’d always dissed his notions of a big G, he’d always thought I was joking as he worked on me but I wasn’t. Not really. He did have a certain something about him and whatever that was, it became an unexamined backstop of our friendship. He was my touchstone, a glimmer of hope and my ace in the hole, someone who’d pushed through all my tough-guy BS front and taken a deep look down into me and found the little me who still wanted to be a believer. He was always confident he’d get me back into the fold and I had a sneaking hope he just might pull it off, but I should have known I couldn’t protect him from the fire, because he’d never really seen the fire. That day, he saw it and it burnt that something out of him. It roasted the poor bastard alive. As bad days go, the complete destruction of the steady and sure religious underpinning of his life was the cherry on top of it all. Lord help an unbeliever out here, at least spare him because I knew he’d be no bloody good wrestling with all the godless doubts that have always nagged away at a low creature like me. It was a slow, untreatable and seventy per cent, first class, New York primo steak, first degree burns injury that no amount of skin grafts could make better. In the end he became someone looking for nothing more than a meaningful way of checking out, but the reality was that he was just another casualty of that day. It was a kind of delayed reaction thing which took a few more years of his life to play itself out. Corny but true, life has a habit of taking out the decent ones early, and again I watched and couldn’t do anything more than help see him out of the chaos his life eventually became. Hush up now, it’ll all be okay, I swear to Christ. You take your rest, I’ve got you. You just pop along now. You stagger out of a few discos like that and it becomes clear that the common denominator, that promised basis of all religions simply doesn’t stack up with the reality – behave yourself, follow whatever scriptures you’re supposed to do and you’ll end up in Heaven, Nirvana or wherever deist carrot is being dangled. The innocents never even had the time to be bad boys or girls, so the whole idea of a life as some sort of test you run in order to earn entrance into some higher plain of existence is quite frankly open to question. The wake up message is as old as Agamemnon’s soldiers throwing Troy’s babies from the battlements of a city being sacked. This is supposed to be a climate skeptic blog and we’re straying into areas theological, which I’m pretty sure most skeptics are uncomfortable with, but I’m afraid that atrophied appendix of a religious upbringing is the mainspring of why I blog. Relax, I’m not some born again Christian after you on the sly. Rather, anything I do here is out of a sense of fairness, which as a reason can be tinselled and tarted up to something as grand as ethics or dare I say it, morality. Of late, notables like Andrew Montford, Peter lee and somewhat indirectly Richard Tol, have dipped their toe into those murky waters to a slightly puzzled silence from the skeptic blogosphere. Where are you Matt? Even allowing for the stiffness of the articles, it’s about time they moved out of their comfort zones and made the human case for opposition to an agenda that’s supposed to save the Earth at our expense, and I mean that not only in terms of dollars and cents but lives lost. Lives. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about us being proved right, about egos, about proving them wrong, but about fishing a few people out of a raging sea. We have to be focused, direct and a lot better than the stereotype we’ve always portrayed us as, so we can pull as many out as we can. The fundamental indecency of the whole thing is the widespread and unquestioned belief on both sides that it’s somehow a quasi-scientific argument, a fencing bout with supporters on sides cheering on their champions. It’s all too easy to see why the developing world see us, all of us, as totally irrelevant, if only because we behave like pampered children who’re puzzled that they don’t have any cake to eat. I can point this very day at the harm being done to human beings by policies which are supposed to save people a century or so in the future. We don’t allow them GM crops, so they die. We don’t allow them to do coal-powered generation, so they die. We don’t allow them to DDT the arse off mosquitos that kill them with Malaria, so they die. We just don’t allow anything we think wouldn’t be good for them and they just obligingly die. It’s not a problem. Nobody sort of notices and anyway, mostly their arses aren’t white so they don’t actually count as real people. We’ve already done the whole trip and totally ruined our own environment so there’s definitely no way we’d allow them to make the same mistakes. We’ll guide them forwards towards some medieval rustic, but yet beautiful and untainted existence skipping around the savannahs like seventeenth century French peasants and they’ll love us for doing it. All I see are dire scientific predictions of an approaching Armageddon, which can only be prevented by throwing buckets full of money vampired out of the poor and passed on to the already rich. With a certain boring regularity, the predictions just fail to materialise and are therefore just ratcheted on a decade or two into the future. Nobody cares because it’s a feeding frenzy. Trough it baby, go for it. Get your piece of the pie while it’s still there. I see people lining their pockets. I see greed, I see lies, mendacity, deceit and raw naked academic thuggery being used to advance a discredited theory that’s been crumbling like a sandcastle before an incoming tide for the last decade. It’s being crushed under the Everest weight of real world data that simply refuses to conform to its projections. What the hell, nobody cares anyway. You have enough bruising encounters with ethics in the real world and I’m afraid your wonderful standards slip because you end up with the choice of being a righteous prick who’s paralysed within a dilemma of your own artificial ethical framework or someone who’s decided to do something expedient right now because you yielded to your own humanity. If you’ve ventured to knock around the edges of our comfortable existence in the rich world, that bad day will eventually pay you a visit and it’ll be make your mind up time – and there’ll always be an urgent window on it too. Do something now, right now, because if you keep chewing it over for the next few minutes, circumstances will effectively make your decision for you. If policies are killing people for no better reason than an unproven theory, then those policies are simply misguided, and if those policies are pursued while turning a blind eye to their impact on the most helpless ones amongst us, then anyone knowingly supporting such policies are not simply bad or ignorant people, they are immoral, if not simply evil. Their finger might not actually be on the trigger, but to my mind they’re still doing the popping. Perhaps we’ve finally reached the stage where it’s now been recognised that it’s not about whether there actually is a legitimate moral argument which can be made by climate skeptics, but that it’s actually the argument to be made. ©Pointman Related articles by Pointman: |
Wind Weasels Determined to Continue Scamming the Ratepayers….
The Wind Industry’s Need for Massive Subsidies: The Never Ending Story
December 15, 2014 by
Wind Power Is Intermittent, But Subsidies Are Eternal
Wall Street Journal
Tim Phillips
1 December 2014
“Tax credits have been essential to the economic viability of wind farms so far, but will not be needed within a few years.” So said Christopher Flavin, now president emeritus of the Worldwatch Institute – in 1984.
Thirty years and billions of dollars later, the wind industry is still saying it needs taxpayer support. Congress is currently hearing this argument as it debates whether to extend the 22-year-old “production tax credit” in the lame-duck session.
The PTC, which gives wind producers a 2.3-cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour of electricity produced over 10 years, expired at the end of 2013. Now wind-industry lobbyists are roaming the halls of Congress, asking legislators to renew it as part of a tax-extenders package before adjourning on Dec. 15.
The industry’s arguments are bluster. Wind-power capacity has increased by nearly 5,000% since the PTC was created and the industry now makes billions of dollars in annual revenue. Meanwhile, the credit has devolved into another example of corporate welfare.
Over the past seven years, the PTC has cost taxpayers $7.3 billion, and it is expected to pay out $2.4 billion more in 2015. Combined with other subsidies and programs, wind generators received $56.29 in government subsidies per megawatt-hour in 2010, according to a 2012 report from the Institute for Energy Research. That’s compared with 64 cents in subsidies for natural gas and $3.14 for nuclear power.
The program operates as one of America’s least-known wealth-redistribution schemes, forcing taxpayers to pick up the tab for wind farms beyond their borders. In 2012 more than 30 states paid more in subsidies than wind farms in those states received in tax credits. Citizens in five states paid more than $100 million more in federal taxes than they received from the PTC: California ($196 million), New York ($163 million), Florida ($138 million), New Jersey ($126 million) and Ohio ($104 million). Eleven states paid into the PTC even though they have no qualifying wind production. The unlucky losers included Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.
The credit also encourages abuse — both of the electricity grid and the taxpayer. Instead of paying wind producers based on how much of their electricity is used, the PTC pays them based on how much electricity they generate. Companies that invest in wind power thus receive tax credits to produce something that consumers may not actually want. In fact, producers often pay electricity-grid operators to take their product. This phenomenon is known as “negative pricing.”
Wall Street has figured out that it can use this system to its advantage. The PTC offers major corporations a chance to lower their tax rates by investing in wind energy. But investors also realize that wind farms make little financial sense if the taxpayer isn’t picking up the tab.
Wind power’s fluctuating growth patterns bear this out. In 1992 wind installations produced about 2.8 million megawatt hours of electricity; in 2013 wind installations produced 167.6 million megawatt hours. Yet when the PTC expired temporarily in 2000, wind installations plummeted 92% the next year. The same thing happened in 2002 and 2004, when new installations fell 76% after two temporary expirations.
But the past few years deserve special mention. For most of 2012, wind producers weren’t sure if the PTC would be renewed at the end of the year. As a result, producers didn’t break ground on new projects, with only 1,100 new megawatts brought online the following year – a more than 90% drop.
Yet Congress caved and gave the PTC a one-year extension in January 2013, throwing in a bonus: Wind projects under construction by the end of the year would still be eligible for the PTC, even if they wouldn’t come online until after the credit expired.
Corporations and wind producers promptly rushed to cash in the taxpayer’s generosity. The industry broke ground on 12,000 megawatts of new wind farms before the PTC finally expired on Dec. 31. Thanks to the credit’s 10-year payout guarantee, taxpayers still have another decade of subsidizing wind.
It would be a mistake for Congress to renew the PTC again, and it is time to let the wind industry compete with other energy industries in a fair market. Congress should ignore the hot air surrounding the PTC and let it flutter away forever.
Mr. Phillips is the president of Americans for Prosperity.
Wall Street Journal
More than just a few parallels to be drawn from that great little piece and the wind industry’s current efforts to keep the scam rolling here.
No matter where they ply their trade, the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers will never be accused of running a consistent theme when it comes to wind power’s (supposed) ability to compete with conventional generation sources.
Whenever the political brains trust start challenging the true and hidden costs of wind power to their constituents, these boys start babbling about the wonders of wind being “free”; their costs coming down all the time; and – in their more fantasy-filled moments – making the wildest claim of all: that wind power is already truly competitive with coal and gas fired generation (see our posts here and here).
That drivel lasts for just as long as it takes for the political conversation to turn to chopping the massive stream of subsidies directed by government mandate to wind power outfits. At which point, they sober up really fast – and start whining like spoilt brats about threats to investment and jobs (read their “own investments and their own jobs”).
In this recent post, we threw down the gauntlet – challenging the Australian wind industry’s spruikers to pin their colours to the mast.
Is wind power REALLY competitive with conventional generators?
Or is it just a perpetual infant, that would die a natural death in a heartbeat in the absence of massive subsidies filched from power consumers, under the threat of whopping fines that get levied against retailers that fail or refuse to play ball?
While that story will shift like the desert sands – and continue to be delivered with the all the persuasion of Little Britain’s vacillating Queen of Darkley Noone, Vicky Pollard, whenever she’s put on the spot – the one constant is that the “future” of the wind industry will be just as it always has been: one entirely wedded to corporate welfare on a mammoth scale.
Big wind Pressing Congress, For More Money! $$$$$$$$ It’s a money-pit!
| Via. Greenie Watch 30 November 2014
Big Wind is pressing Congress for yet another bailout By Mary Kay Barton Taxpayers beware! While you were sleeping, enjoying your family and eating turkey, Congress has been busy. Congressional Republicans are negotiating with Senate Democrats to extend the infamous wind energy Production Tax Credit through to 2017, after which it will supposedly be phased out, just as was supposed to happen in the past. This sneaky, dark-of-night “lame duck” session tactic should be flatly rejected. While you’ve been busy just trying to make ends meet, wondering why the cost of everything is going up, and agonizing over how your children and grandchildren will ever pay the mounting $18 TRILLION dollar national debt – the wind industry lobbyists’ group, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), just sent Congress a letter seeking to extend the federal, taxpayer-funded wind Production Tax Credit (PTC). The list of signers to AWEA’s letter include rent-seeking industries and “green” groups who’ve all benefitted by tapping into taxpayers’ wallets via the Big Wind PTC (aka: Pork-To-Cronies). It certainly isn’t hard to figure out why these corporations pay many millions of dollars to hire lobbyists and run national TV advertising campaigns geared at convincing crony-politicians to vote to continue these TAXES and higher energy prices on American citizens. AWEA’a letter is typical of wind industry propaganda. It makes specious claims about creating jobs and reducing pollution, without providing a shred of evidence to PROVE any of their claims. AWEA apparently hopes Congressional officials are “too stupid” to understand what energy-literate citizens nationwide know: Industrial wind can NEVER provide reliable power. It raises electricity costs, even after subsidies are factored in. It kills more jobs than it creates. It defiles wildlife habitats and kills eagles, hawks, other birds and bats – with no penalties to Big Wind operators. Here’s the reality: After 22+ years of picking U.S. taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ pockets, industrial wind has NOT significantly reduced carbon dioxide emissions. It has not replaced any conventional power plants, anywhere. However, the $Trillions spent on these “green” boondoggles to date have significantly added to the $18+ TRILLION dollar debt that our children and grandchildren will have to bear. AWEA’s own statements from years and decades past can be used against them. To cite just one example, 31 years ago, a study coauthored by the AWEA stated: The private sector can be expected to develop improved solar and wind technologies which will begin to become competitive and self- supporting on a national level by the end of the decade if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D. [American Wind Energy Association, et al. Quoted in Renewable Energy Industry, Joint Hearing before the Subcommittees of the Committee on Energy and Commerce et al., House of Representatives, 98th Cong., 1st sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983, p. 52.] In other words, the PTC should have ended 20 years ago, because wind energy would be self-sustaining by then. It wasn’t. It still isn’t. It never will be. We need to pull the PTC plug now! Here are some details about the bill that is currently being negotiated during the lame duck session –before the newly elected, Republican majority Senate takes office and can do much about it. In 2016, wind developers would be eligible for 80% percent of the PTC’s value. They could also claim 60% of its value through the first nine months of 2017, after which it would supposedly expire. The proposed congressional deal also seems to continue basing PTC eligibility on when project construction project begins. That opens huge doors for abuse. The last time Congress extended the PTC, as part of its “fiscal cliff” deal in 2013, it said “eligibility” for taxpayer largesse covered projects “under construction,” rather than requiring that they be “placed in service” by a certain date. In practice, this means just a shovelful of dirt has to be moved by that date. Remember too that the Production Tax Credit supposedly expired last year. But this clever language has allowed construction and expansion in the meantime. Meanwhile, Lois Lerner’s Internal Revenue Service has helpfully said projects that were started or “safe- harbored” prior to the PTC’s most recent pseudo-expiration can claim tax credits if they are in service by 2015. And then they can claim the $23-per-MWh credit for ten more years! What a wonderful holiday gift for Big Wind and its political sponsors – at your expense. Our government should NOT be in the business of picking and choosing the winners and losers in the energy marketplace – while assaulting and harming the very citizens they are forcing to pay for this “green” energy scam. It’s time for government to get out of the way and let the markets work! The best solutions will rise to the top of their own accord because they will provide modern power at the best prices – thereby maintaining the reliable, affordable power that has made America great. Citizens nation-wide have awakened to this massive “green” energy scam. Many have sent letters to Congress like the one below. You can join the fight by contacting your representatives and urging them to do the right thing: Protect American consumers, taxpayers and ratepayers. END Wind Welfare (#EndWindWelfare)! |
"Mothers Against Wind Turbines™" Phoenix Rising... 