Enough with Wind Power

Everyone loves wind turbines. They offer renewable energy at a supposedly reasonable price, and they do not harm the precious natural environment. Of course, as Texas discovered recently, if perchance the wind stops blowing, your reliance on wind energy does not look so smart. Remember Iphigenia.

Nothing warms our hearts more and generates more Schadenfreude than the news coming from those parts of the country that virtuously embraced wind farms, only to discover the downside of the wind. I will note in passing that the new administration wants America to start manufacturing wind turbine blades. Now they are all produced in China. 

Anyway, a Wall Street Journal op ed by Robert Bryce opens with the fact that most Americans love wind energy.

Gallup data show about 70% of Americans want “more emphasis” on wind energy. Plenty of politicians like the idea, too. President Biden’s proposed Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard calls for “tens of thousands of wind turbines.”

But then, the NIMBY crowd has arisen and has declared that wind farms are fine, when they are in someone else’s back yard:

... local governments across the country are rejecting wind energy projects. Since 2015, about 300 government entities from Vermont to Hawaii have rejected or restricted wind projects. In March the select board in Scituate, Mass., ordered a wind turbine in the coastal town to be shut down at night from mid-May to mid-October. The problem, according to the Boston Globe: complaints from neighbors who say “they can’t sleep at night because of noise” the wind turbine makes.

The planning board in Foster, R.I., voted 5-1 on April 7 to ban wind turbines. The board took action after hearing from residents of Portsmouth, R.I., who had turbines built near their homes. The Valley Breeze newspaper reported that Portsmouth residents warned the board “about their experiences, complaining about constant noise disturbances, vibrations, and loss in home values from turbines in their neighborhood.”

This puts a price on virtue, especially on green new deal virtue. If you are in the vicinity of wind turbines, they will destroy your health, cause you to vibrate when you do not want to vibrate, and make your property nearly unsellable.

The nice part is that the backlash is most fierce in blue states:

Some of the fiercest fights against Big Wind are happening in the bluest states. Good luck building a wind turbine in Vermont, home of Bernie Sanders, one of the Senate’s loudest proponents of renewable energy. In New York, so many communities are rejecting wind and solar projects that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration recently pushed through regulations that will give Albany officials authority to override the objections of local communities and issue permits for large renewable projects. In California, wind turbines are so difficult to site that most developers have simply given up trying to build new projects in the state.

Did you catch the New York State solution? Gov. Cuomo, politically weakened, has still managed to introduce new regulations that will deprive local residents of any say in whether or not they have wind farms in their communities. Two cheers for democracy!!

Of course, wind farms are not viable economically. They cost so much that they need government subsidies:

These conflicts matter because the wind and solar industries are fueled by lucrative federal tax incentives. Between 2010 and 2029, tax breaks for wind and solar will total about $140 billion. The Biden administration is proposing a 10-year extension of those incentives.

The Green New Deal notwithstanding, the rantings of a Swedish school girl notwithstanding, renewable energy is a boondoggle. It cannot do what it promises, unless you are willing to run the country on a lot less energy. And that means, more blackouts, less heat and much higher energy prices.

The verdict seems clear, to those who can see, of course:

Every form of energy production takes a toll on the environment. But it’s time for policy makers to realize that wind and solar power can’t supply the quantities of energy the U.S. economy demands at prices American consumers can afford. The problems aren’t limited to cost, intermittency, noise, the death of wildlife, or the Bunyanesque amounts of copper, steel and rare-earth elements the industry requires. The fundamental constraint is land. Places like Scituate, Foster, Yates, and Madison County are fighting wind projects because, like people everywhere, they care about and want to protect their communities.

Paving rural America with forests of giant wind turbines and oceans of solar panels won’t solve climate change. It will, however, cost trillions of dollars, blight landscapes, kill untold numbers of bats and birds, make people sick, and lead to more economic pain in rural towns and counties.

As you know, China is happy to produce solar panels and wind turbines. Business is business, after all. And when your competitor is sabotaging himself, why not contribute. In the meantime, China keeps building coal power plants and even nuclear power plants. Somehow or other they are immune to the apocalyptic ravings of AOC and Greta Thunberg.