The wind power sell job

If wind power is so wonderful, why has sea commerce abandoned these ships?

Like almost all "alternative" energy schemes, wind-turbines are going to make some people very wealthy. But turbines will never make even a small dent in the power generation needed to meet even the world's increase in energy needs over the coming years. In fact, "Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy," says the UK Spectator.

Read the whole thing, but here is a bullet-point summary:

• world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years, today by about 2,000 terawatt-hours per year.        
  
• It would take nearly 350,000 new wind turbines per year to meet just the increase in demand.
  
• That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.
  
• That many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland, every year.
  
• If we kept this up for 50 years, it would take a land area the size of Russia covered with wind farms - just to meet the demand for new energy.
  
• Wind turbines are already close to power-generation efficiency limit. The main limit on efficiency is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.
  
• Wind is a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. We stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

There are other costs of wind power, too. One is straightforward financial in the form of government subsidies and the other hidden costs of grotesque environmental impacts.

Newsweek pointed out in 2015 that wind power could never survive in a fair market on its own. It relies on tens of billion of dollars in federal subsidies, which in 2016 the Obama administration declared should be made permanent.

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

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

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

The subsidies are called the Production Tax Credit (PTC). It is yet another example of what I have long called a Sheriff of Nottingham plan: take money from the poor (or middle class) via taxation and give it to wealthy wind-power barons via subsidies. As The Hill points out:

If that isn't crony capitalism, I don't know what is.

The only reason wind energy has hobbled along is because of the government crutch that props it up. What does a permanent government subsidy say about the true viability of the wind industry? It proves that the wind industry is fully dependent on government handouts and can't ever be independent. So, why do we continue to allow our tax dollars to be thrown at an enterprise that cannot support itself in the foreseeable future? That's the question no politician wants to answer.

Not only does the PTC make the wind industry dependent on government funds, it takes money from the average American and gives it to the super-wealthy. The PTC is really a reverse Robin Hood, taking money from the poor to give to the rich. Money-savvy Warren Buffett fully realizes that the wind industry is not economically productive without the government there to push it along. Buffett said, "[O]n wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit." While the PTC exists, private investors like multibillionaire Warren Buffett are able to profit at the taxpayers' expense.

"Follow the money" indeed. Cui bono? Not you or me, buddy.

What about environmental costs? Don't wind turbines save the planet? Not even close. Back to my bullet points of the Spectator:

• The direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough.
  
• But there is also is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale.
  
• Wind turbines are made mostly of steel and concrete. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine.
  
• Steel is made with coal, providing the heat for smelting ore and carbon in the alloy. 
• Cement also uses coal.
  
• The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
  
• It take 150 tonnes of coal to make one turbine.
  
• To build 350,000 wind turbines a year just to keep up with increasing energy demand, will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

In summary:

Wind power is not reliable, requires a backup-generation source, is overwhelmingly expensive, takes money from the poor to give to the rich, can never make a significant impact of total-power sourcing, requires near-unthinkable areas of land mass or sea beds for the turbines, increases reliance on fossil fuels, and requires very environmentally-adverse rare-earth mining operations that endemically heavily exploit children and poor adult labor.

So why are we still doing this? Oh, yeah ...