The eagle nest is located approximately 75 miles from Washington, D.C. on the campus of The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services’ National Conservation Training Center. The campus is in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, along the Potomac River.
Courtesy of the Outdoor Channel – View here!
Thanks to the Allegheny Front Alliance for the link.
Here’s the headline at Renewable Energy World that got my hopes up – Wind Industry Fires Back, Calls for RES
But no, the “group of wind energy executives as well as the CEO of the American Wind Energy Association called on the U.S. Congress today to quickly enact a strong federal renewable energy standard,” didn’t include performance standards for their industry. You know, that they might actually have to produce electricity at some minimal level, on demand, without requiring coal, natural gas and nuclear to ramp up and down to support the horrible fluctuation brought to the grid by the unreliable wind.
Heck, they weren’t even asking for standards that would require members of the AWEA to demonstrate that they were actually producing anything at all.
Worse, after all the hoopla about reducing greenhouse emissions and closing fossil fueled plants these executives and the AWEA official didn’t beg Congress for the opportunity to prove the results by reporting any of their successes.
This crowd keeps tossing jobs into their mom and apple pie presentations. Their success in actually producing any is continually questioned.
So, what the heck is an RES?
The American Wind Energy Association answers thusly:
The Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), also known as a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), is a flexible, market-driven policy that enables renewable energy sources, such as wind, to provide the clean, reliable, domestic power the U.S. needs. An RES ensures that
some amount of renewable energy is included in the portfolio of electricity resources serving a state or country.
25% Renewable Electricity by 2025
A national standard of 25 percent renewable-based electricity by the year 2025 offers a least-cost, marketfriendly way to ensure that we meet an increasing share of America’s growing electricity needs with clean, domestic energy resources. Wind and other renewable energy sources are currently available, rapidly deployable and cost-effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Of course, I don’t know how a Congressionally mandated requirement becomes a “market driven” policy, but then I don’t know how the AWEA continues to claim reductions in emissions yet offers no concrete evidence to prove that is occurring.
Anyway … if something changes and the wind industry asks Congress to pass real standards that will require the industry to pay its own way, drop me a line. Otherwise, I’ll keep hoping to see jobs created in industries where the salaries don’t require such a heavy cost of consumers and taxpayers. We have enough government workers and, frankly, a job associated with this industry’s record of little real contribution to the public good, borders on government work.
No offense to the excellent construction workers.
From PJM – Emails recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act — seen here for the first time — show how political influence and lobbyists are shaping Obama administration policy and public relations.
Click the links below to read the FOIA request and the emails:
The emails show that the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated their response to a damning Spanish report on “green jobs” with wind industry lobbyists and the Center for American Progress (the progressive think tank founded by John Podesta and funded by George Soros).
Read the entire article and much more at the link below.
This series of videos is provided for your viewing without comment. Yours are, of course, welcome.
Part 1 of February 19, 2010 briefing to the Omaha Press Club by the director of the Nebraska Energy Office. Recorded by EV World.com.
Part 2 of February 18, 2010 briefing to the Omaha Press Club by the director of the Nebraska Energy Office. Recorded by EV World.com.
Part 3 of February 18, 2010 briefing to the Omaha Press Club by the director of the Nebraska Energy Office. Recorded by EV World.com.
Nebraska Renewable Energy Association president Robert Byrne addresses the Omaha Press Club on Feb 18, 2010. Recorded by EV World.Com.
Robert Brynes concludes his discussion of establishing renewable energy in Nebraska, a state blessed with wind and solar resources, but hampered by public policy and political inertia.
Audience Q&A with Nebraska Energy Office Director Neil Moseman and Nebraska Renewable Energy Association president Robert Byrnes at the Omaha Press Club on 18 February 2010. See EV World for previous videos in this series.
Conclusion of audience Q&A with Nebraska Energy Office Director Neil Moseman and Nebraska Renewable Energy Association president Robert Byrnes at the Omaha Press Club on 18 February 2010. See EV World for previous videos in this series.
Please inform of any difficulty viewing the videos.
From the Baltimore Sun: The fantasy of wind power for Maryland
By Jon Boone
March 8, 2010
An Abell Foundation report recently trumpeted the supposed “potential” of offshore wind to provide two-thirds of Maryland’s electricity needs. Talk about hot air. With about 100,000 industrial wind turbines in operation around the world — 35,000 in the U.S. alone — there is not a shred of empirical evidence that wind has been responsible for offsetting greenhouse gas emissions in the production of electricity — or that it has contributed to any reductions in fossil fuel use.
Although 20 percent of Denmark’s installed electricity capacity consists of wind energy, much more than half of its actual generation is exported, for grid security reasons, to elsewhere in Scandinavia, where it displaces highly flexible hydro generation at no savings in CO2 emissions but with substantial cost to Danish ratepayers. Moreover, hydro imported from the rest of Scandinavia is used to balance most of the wind volatility that remains in Denmark, so that any CO2 offset there is due to hydro, not wind.
If Denmark did not have the Scandinavian “sink” in which to dump its considerable excess wind, and if that sink did not have hydro as its principle source of power, Denmark would be awash in both carbon dioxide emissions and wind turbines in the production of electricity. As the journalist Robert Bryce has written, “In 1999, Denmark’s daily coal consumption was the equivalent of about 94,400 barrels of oil per day. By 2007, despite a 136 percent increase in the amount of electricity produced from wind, Denmark’s coal consumption was exactly the same as it was back in 1999.”
The apotheosis of wind technology was embodied in the wonderful Clipper ships of the 19th Century. There’s a good reason they are now consigned to museums. The energy requirements of 2010 insist upon precision, controllable machine performance that passes stern tests for reliability standards. Wind technology is completely inimical to reliable performance standards. Our modern system of power insists on capacity value — getting a specific amount of energy on demand and controlling it whenever desired.
And so the issue is how to make people believe that a source of energy that relentlessly, continuously destabilizes the essential match between supply and demand, is highly variable and unresponsive, and provides no capacity value (while being inimical to demand cycles) can effectively provide two-thirds of Maryland’s electricity. Although there are indeed vast stores of energy in the ocean’s winds, the trick is to convert them to useful power. Energy is the ability to do work and power is the rate at which work is done; wind technology delivers fluctuating energy at a rate appropriate for 1810 — even with a flotilla of wind rigs anchored offshore.
Imagine that Maryland had 500 skyscraper-sized wind turbines — say, 100 in the mountains, 200 in and around the Chesapeake Bay (by far the best wind resource within the state’s interior) and another 200 offshore — with a total installed capacity (that is, the optimum performance of the turbines) of 1,250 megawatts. Odds are that the capacity factor for all that installed wind would not exceed 30 percent (for a variety of reasons). Consequently, the area’s grid, which generates more than 140,000 megawatts at peak demand times, would get an average yield of only 375 megawatts from all that wind. Sixty percent of the time it would generate less than 375 megawatts, and 20 percent of the time, especially at peak demand, it would produce virtually nothing.
All this wind wouldn’t dent a grape in the scheme of things. What must happen when, for example, 1,000 megawatts of wind energy drops in an hour to less than 50, as it sometimes would? Tripling the number of wind turbines would magnify the problem.
More than 70 percent of any wind project’s installed capacity must come from conventional generation that performs inefficiently as it quickly ramps up and back to balance wind’s relentless volatility. This is not “supporting” or back-up generation but rather pro-active, reliable power that must be actively entangled with wind to make it work. Given the dearth of hydro in the PJM, this means the inefficient use of fossil fuels, particularly coal units.
Yes, any grid can “integrate” wind volatility, at least up to certain levels of penetration. But not without substantial increased costs, both in dollars and CO2 emissions. Wind behaves much like a drunken driver. Imagine what must happen to “integrate” a substantial number of drunks on our highways, and you get some idea of what is necessary to incorporate wind as it staggers its way around the grid. Maryland wind would play a dysfunctional role in terms of improving the state’s grid security and reducing greenhouse gases.
Industrial wind is perhaps the silliest modern energy idea imaginable. In the final analysis, it’s a faith-based proposition, requiring people to close their minds and clap their hands to revive it from a life-and-death struggle against unbelief, bringing the technology back from the oblivion that the steam engine consigned it to hundreds of years ago.
Throwing vast amounts of the public’s treasure down the rathole of wind is to deny investment in infinitely more effective technologies — such as nuclear — that will preserve the energy requirements of modernity. It is incredibly irresponsible.
Wind may seem like cutting-edge and progressive technology. In reality, it’s antediluvian and uncivil. Only authoritarian government would force such nonsense on anyone’s backyard.
Jon Boone, a Western Maryland resident, is a former college administrator and longtime environmentalist who has written and spoken extensively on the subject of wind energy. His e-mail is bjboone@verizon.net.
Sun Commentary Ends!
Allegheny Treasures Note: Mr. Boone’s very informative website is Stop Ill Wind. Go there to read from the many factual writings and presentations Mr. Boone has conducted all across the US and the World.
Chasing votes with ‘clean and green’ – Despite the talk, ideology doesn’t translate to actual alternative energy
By JOHN HOFMEISTER
HOUSTON CHRONCLE
March 6, 2010, 4:00PM
Part one in a series.
I’m a backer of wind, solar and biofuels as new, high-technology future contributors to the energy supply of the nation. Facing the daunting demand forecasts of the medium- and long-term future, the nation will need all the energy it can produce from every available source. Today’s seeming abundance of energy is a recession-driven aberration from the continuing rise in postindustrial, electron-dominated energy requirements in this century. Companies, institutions, governments and homes are run by information systems and countless electrical devices. When transportation also demands electrons, watch your meter spin!
Yet public officials from the president and vice president to Cabinet and congressional leaders insult our intelligence by delivering scripted messages that the future of the new energy system in this country is clean renewable energy that will be delivered by countless so-called green jobs. The fake chimes of energy independence echo up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Do headlines make truth, regardless of content? What is it about organizations like Repower America and the Center for American Progress, which provide ideology, not substance, to the administration and congressional leadership on the so-called new energy system? Why are their conclusions unchallenged? Is it ease of messaging, for who can be against clean and green? Is it to run away from hard choices about hydrocarbons and nuclear energy? No one’s against cleaner energy. But is it material? Is it affordable? Can it deliver commercial, ample new energy to the ever-aging existing energy system? Let’s be honest. It’s incremental and expensive.
The American people, if sometimes late, are eventually pragmatic about energy hype without substance. Wind and solar don’t reduce the electric bill; biofuels don’t reduce gas prices. Misinformation and disinformation lead to communications bankruptcy. I told Sen. Barack Obama he needed a hydrocarbon plank in his presidential energy platform to deliver affordable gasoline. He responded that, as president, he would do biofuels. I said I’m doing biofuels (at the time as Shell Oil’s president) but not materially by 2012, or even 2016. He said we’ll do biofuels. I asked, with what subsidy? End of conversation.
Clean and green, the energy system we aspire to, is subsidized like no other energy source in history. By whom? Us, and our progeny. All energy has historically received some type of public support to even out the volatility of high and low price cycles. The Energy Information Agency of the U.S. government’s Department of Energy reports that, for 2008, natural gas was subsidized 25 cents per megawatt hour of electricity produced, coal received 44 cents per megawatt hour, nuclear $1.59. Oil was not reported in these numbers since oil is hardly a factor in electricity production. However, oil benefits from a variety of tax subsidies for dry well expenses and royalty holidays dating from the $10-a-barrel oil days of the late 1990s, which the administration promises to rescind. At the same time in the same year, wind energy received public subsidy of $23.37 per megawatt hour; solar energy received $24.34. These numbers do not include the additional subsidies we taxpayers have been compelled to pay for wind, solar and biofuels through the stimulus plan, the 2010 budget and the 2011 framework budget. These subsidies help support 2 percent of today’s energy system. Their proponents promise to double and double again the amounts of subsidized supply from clean and green with no commitment to ending subsidies. That’s not a new energy system.
Here’s the problem I have with what the administration and Congress are doing. They are frittering at the edges of the energy system, not even building a manufacturing base to sustain its growth, because it’s politically popular. Polls say bashing the energy industry gets votes. You don’t govern by promoting coal, oil, gas and nuclear when you just got elected berating them. Symbols trump substance. Meanwhile, our leaders ignore 93 percent of base energy — hydrocarbons and nuclear, which are aging rapidly and in need of major new investment — at their constituents’ peril. The nation needs its leaders to promote short-, medium- and long-term energy supplies from all sources and do what it takes to deliver. Beginning with the Nixon administration, we’ve had eight presidents and 18 Congresses who have promised energy independence and never delivered.
Recent announcements on tripling loan guarantees for future nuclear construction are little more than sleeves off the vest. Loan guarantees are useless for unaffordable new nuclear investments, which have also just lost their future source of nuclear waste disposal. The administration torched $20 billion of our money, announcing its determination to forever close Yucca Mountain, Nevada’s national nuclear waste repository. After decades of build-out, just as the site sought license approval, an eight-week-old administration pulled the budget plug.
Does anyone suspect the reason? Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, faces a tough re-election race in 2010; he is benefited by the energy secretary’s announcement, undoubtedly from orders on high, to shut down the nation’s only safe and reliable storage site. Now we’re appointing a blue ribbon panel to study what we studied decades ago and report out in two more years. Why not a blue ribbon panel to commoditize nuclear and reprocess waste to lower costs, so we can actually build more plants?
As for hydrocarbons, the administration is proposing a series of demonstration projects to evaluate carbon capture and sequestration by 2016. Never mind that new coal leasing is all but dead, stopped in its tracks by the EPA. They’re kicking the can down the alley, while making headlines as if they’re doing something.
Regarding other hydrocarbons, EPA regulation of fracking is being proposed, which will add time and cost to developing tight gas reserves. Offshore leasing for drilling is as stalled as it was when congressional and presidential moratoria precluded it for 30 years.
But “clean and green” it is: the simplistic formula to make it look like we’re serious about producing more energy. It will produce votes, not material energy. It’s not enough and never will be. We’re headed for an energy abyss.
Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil, is founder and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy. He also is the author of the book Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk From an Energy Insider (Palgrave Macmillan, $27).
Thanks to our friends at Wind Concerns Ontario for this piece from Michael Trebilock: Blowing away taxpayers
Wind power is unreliable, expensive and doesn’t result in lower C02 emmissions. Why is Ontario still rushing ahead with it?
By Michael Trebilcock, National Post
The Ontario government’s rush into renewable energy, and industrial wind turbine-generated electricity in particular, is likely to reveal the law of unintended consequences. The government needs to rigorously re-evaluate this precipitous policy before committing billions more in subsidies to it.
First, as to the cost of wind-generated electricity, the feed-in tariff for on-shore wind turbines in Ontario provided for under the Green Energy Act is 13.5¢ per kWh (and higher for smaller projects). This is more than twice the prevailing rates for electricity on the spot market in Ontario (less than ¢6 per KWh).
This cost increase will be fed through to industrial, commercial and residential consumers through various additional charges on their electricity bills. In addition, further expenditures are required to enhance and extend the transmission grid to accommodate these projects. A 2009 study by London Economics Consultancy, Examining the Potential Costs of the Ontario Green Energy Act 2009, estimates that the higher costs of green power will add hundreds of dollars to the average electricity bills of households throughout Ontario.
Adam White, President of the Association of Major Power Consumers of Ontario, states: “The situation is not sustainable because it will leave companies paying higher rates than competitors in other jurisdictions.” Toronto energy lawyer, Peter Murphy, states: “The government is sitting on a political time bomb.” Recent studies of wind power in Denmark, Germany and the U.K. reach similar conclusion about the impacts of renewable energy on electricity costs in these three jurisdictions. The Ontario government’s estimate of an increase in electricity costs per year from its renewable policies of 1% a year seems to lack any justification or credibility.
The contributions of industrial wind power to reducing CO2 emissions are at best marginal. Massive numbers of turbines are needed, and because of their intermittency and unpredictability, they require the availability of back-up generation, especially for peak-load capacity. In Denmark, Germany, the U.K., and now Ontario, this has entailed the construction of additional fossil fuel plants (typically natural gas plants) to provide reliability. These plants dramatically reduce the net contributions of wind power to CO2 abatement, which come at an extremely high cost relative to other abatement strategies (such as real-time pricing of electricity).
In the case of base-load electricity, most of this is provided in Ontario by carbon-clean hydro and nuclear power so that, to the extent that wind power is used to provide base-load electricity, it displaces lower cost hydro and nuclear power and often results in exports of surplus power, often at give-away prices.
In October 2007, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) — the government’s own agency, tasked with planning Ontario’s power system and now entering into long-term contracts with renewable energy producers — published its Integrated Power System Plan, where it analyzed a “high wind power” scenario for the province, and concluded: “Since wind generation has an effective capacity of 20% compared to 73% for hydroelectric generation, additional generation capacity with better load-following characteristics would need to be installed.
“This needed capacity will likely have to be obtained by installing additional gas-fired generation. Thus, in addition to incurring further capital costs for the gas generation installation, higher gas usage would be expected to make up for the reduced amount of renewable energy from wind compared to that from hydroelectric generation or this alternative. Therefore, this alternative would result in higher greenhouse gas emissions.” The OPA concluded: “Wind and solar power will never be more than a niche supplier of power in Ontario.”
What did the OPA see as the better alternative? Renewable hydro power sites in northern Ontario (which it identified). The OPA stated: “The hydroelectric generation developments included in the plan are cost effective compared to developing additional wind generation; this comparison includes the cost of transmission reinforcements. In conclusion, development of major hydroelectric generation north of Sudbury, with major reinforcement of the transmission north of Sudbury, is the preferred alternative compared to developing additional renewable generation in southern Ontario and other parts of northern Ontario.”
This begs the obvious question, what has changed in two years? Beyond these sites in northern Ontario, in the medium to longer term there would be enough northern Canadian hydro power in Manitoba, Quebec and Labrador to satisfy Ontario’s needs for decades. If Boston and New England can depend on northern Canadian hydro power, why not Toronto? Moreover, prior demand projections for electricity need to be revised downwards to reflect not only the current economic recession (demand was down more than 6% in 2009 over 2008), but the long-term contraction in a number of Ontario’s electricity-intensive heavy manufacturing industries, such as steel and automobile manufacturing.
The potential contributions of renewable energy to the creation of jobs in the province require a heavy dose of skepticism. While the government has claimed that it plans to create 50,000 new green jobs in the province over the coming years, the additional burdens on industrial, commercial, and household consumers from higher electricity costs associated with renewable energy will kill existing jobs. Recent studies in Denmark and Germany find that very few net new jobs have been created as a result of renewable energy policies. In the case of Denmark, they have cost between US$90,000 to US$140,000 per job per year in public subsidies, and in the case of Germany, up to US$240,000 per job per year. According to a column by Randall Denley in the Ottawa Citizen of Jan. 24, 2010, the new manufacturing jobs entailed in the massive Samsung renewable project recently announced by the Ontario government will cost $300,000 each in public subsidies.
In an SNL Financial news wire report of Oct. 23, 2009, the Ontario Minister of Natural Resources was reported as stating that the agency had temporarily stopped accepting applications for proposed wind energy projects because it had already received 500 such applications and needed to make sure that it had appropriate processes in place before taking any more. Obviously, the massive public subsidies being offered have provoked a corporate feeding frenzy.
But corporate enthusiasm for subsidized wind power should not be confused with the longer-term public interest. In terms of cost, CO2 and jobs, wind power attracts a failing grade. It gets worse, with poor marks for localized impacts on flora and fauna, for potentially adverse health effects on local residents from persistent exposure to low intensity turbine noise, for potentially adverse impacts on local property values and for an environmental review process which the Ontario Environmental Commissioner describes as “broken.” All render renewable energy policy, at least as currently conceived by the Ontario government, one of the least compelling options in the challenging economic environment in which the province finds itself now.
Picking technological winners in fields such as this, and then picking winners within classes of technology (such as Samsung) are fraught with the risk of costly errors. A better policy orientation would be first to price all sources of electricity, including environmental costs , and let consumers respond accordingly, and finally to subsidize breakthrough R&D in sectors that are significant sources of carbon emissions.
As Jan Carr, former CEO of the Ontario Power Authority, puts it in a recent article: “The recent rush to “green” Ontario’s electricity system has produced a largely ad hoc approach to the selection and investment in power generation technologies that will unnecessarily increase the cost of electricity with far-reaching economic and social effects… Pricing carbon would have the advantage of continuing a century of economically rational development of the electricity system as an essential underpinning of modern society. To do other than proceed on an economic basis is to risk massive economic distortions… The alternative process of picking winners and losers in renewable energy technologies, based on perceptions and public opinion polls, puts us all at considerable risk.”
Before mortgaging its long-term future by awarding hundreds more 20-year fixed-price contracts to wind developers, the province of Ontario urgently needs an independent, objective, expert investigation, perhaps by the Auditor-General, of the prospective economic, environmental and employment effects of wind power and other renewable energy policies in the province.
Financial Post
Michael Trebilcock is professor of law and economics, faculty of law, University of Toronto, and co-author of “The Perils of Picking Technological Winners in Renewable Energy Policy,” an Energy Probe study released yesterday.
By RUSS HARDING | 3/5/2010 11:50 AM
Energy studies out of Spain and Denmark have shown that wind energy is a net jobs loser. These studies cast serious doubt regarding the optimistic claims of wind energy advocates that windmills will help drive the green energy revolution in America by creating jobs and leading us once again into economic prosperity. The energy studies coming out of Europe have also proven to be a serious embarrassment to politicians like President Barack Obama and Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who have made wind and other alternative energy the central tenant of the national and state energy policy. Apparently the U.S. Department of Energy is being used to try and refute these studies.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute just release a report based on documents they obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that show the Energy Department turned to George Soros and his Center for American Progress and other wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies. Among findings reported by CEI is that the Obama administration published a five-page talking points memo assailing the economic assessment written by two pro-wind activists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, neither of whom are economists. These political attacks have failed to refute the fact that alternative energy mandates and subsidies destroy more jobs than they create.
The U.S. Department of Energy should be providing us with unbiased energy information. All Americans should be concerned when federal agencies are used as a political tool to advance policy objectives of the president or members of Congress. Is it any wonder that trust for government it at such a low point?
Original article posted here thanks to the courtesy of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
From the opinion page today at the Rutland (Vermont) Herald Online: Overwhelming vote on wind
The people of Ira have spoken by nearly a fourfold majority that they are in favor of renewable energy, but not industrial wind turbines on our ridgelines. This is the result of an open, transparent, and civil effort that has been inclusive of all of the townspeople over the past nine months. All voices were welcomed and all were listened to. After five warned town meetings the conclusion is clear: We wish Ira to remain as the Rutland Herald characterized it in 2007 as “pure Vermont.”
STAN SHAPIRO
Ira
Allegheny Treasures posts a few from the comment section for a sense of what the folks think. Go the the article to keep up with comments and further articles/opinions.
From what one can observe the best ways to make electric power are from the harnessing of water falling from a high place to a lower place as at Niagra or by artificially creating the fall with a dam. Next it seems that boiling water to make steam for turbines is a common choice among those serious about the business. Coal can be burned to boil the water and is by far the most popular method. (there is no soot emission.) Vermont is not close enough to a coal source to overcome the transportation expense which becomes too major a part of the finished product. Natural gas is available to Vermont in the Northwest of the state. Canada has vast quantities of this fuel and a pipeline following rail ROWs could open up any part of the state to this fuel. You may remember a proposal along those lines and the furor by the uninvolved. We have a Nuke plant but the populace has been frightened by by the anti’s constant drum beat decrying the process and squawking about imaginary deficiencies. The squawkers have no notion of the process and the likelyhood of failure of the plant. Existing businesses play along with the green movement but don’t seem likely to invest serious capital in processes that take acres of land and produce seasonally effected drips of power, which (if one wishes non interruptable power three phase 60 cycle and high wattage) have to have a real well powered generator to back them up. Solar power as I understand it does not yet break even, i.e. you can’t make a solar cell which over the life of the thing will generate enough power to make another solar cell. Remote gadgets use them as the cost of copper and labor to run wires to a remote location is large enough to off set the cell costs, batteries, and inverter( these are DC devices in an AC world). Fourty story fans are a good choice if one is investing for a quick turn around. These things are not maintenance neutral and after a few years of depreciation on mountain tops, ice storms, blistering summer heat and wear and tear on the gearboxes the financial efficiency will fall off. The subsidies and the capital depreciation for tax purpose now exhausted will make them look ugly to an accountant. They will be put up for sale and another round of tax depreciation will begin to send them to the junk yard. The things won’t have to be moved, the junk yard will come to them. Take a trip to the area surrounding Lubbock Texas. See the future of the Vermont experience.
— Posted by None None on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 1:14 pm EST
— Posted by None None on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 12:47 pm EST
— Posted by bruce meyer on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 12:47 pm EST
— Posted by bruce meyer on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 11:34 am EST
Why? Because those poor people don’t have the smarts that people in the gold towns do and they have no appreciation for the views of their betters either. Gee golly whiz, a guy like “rob” builds himself a nice third home from his earnings on Wall Street and now he has to worry that he might have to see a pinwheel on his neighborhood mountain. It’s just not fair! He’s very, very upset. He’s now thinking of vacationing at his second home in Aspen rather than spend all that hard-earned money from derivatives and such, down at the local general store. Oh, well they have such a pedestrian selection of wine and barely any caviar to speak of …
— Posted by Notta Bushman on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 11:29 am EST
— Posted by Earthnutvt on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 11:23 am EST
— Posted by Earthnutvt on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 11:20 am EST
— Posted by Earthnutvt on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 11:18 am EST
So there you have it, same TRUE story, diferent day..We’ve got options…until next time……
Hey, maybe i’ve got the wrong Bruce but, If you see Uncle George tell him I said hello and to get his darn phone hooked up. (Don’t go giving me away now.) Heh Heh.
— Posted by Local Yokel on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 10:54 am EST
— Posted by rob pforzheimer on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 9:38 am EST
— Posted by Captain Tenille on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 8:15 am EST
— Posted by bruce meyer on Sat, Mar 6, 2010, 7:23 am EST
From James Delingpole blogging at the Telegraph.co.uk – “What Dave and his chum Barack don’t want you to know about green jobs and green energy”
(AT Note: Don’t miss the comment section following Mr. Delingpole’s post link above – Good Stuff!)
Mr. Delingpole’s article begins:
Green jobs are a waste of space, a waste of money, a lie, a chimera. You know that. I know that. We’re familiar with the report by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain which shows that for every “green job” that is created another 2.2 jobs are LOST in the real economy.
We also know that alternative energy is a fraud – only viable through enormous government (ie taxpayer subsidy) and utterly incapable of answering anything more than a fraction of our energy needs. AsShannon Love puts it here:
Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:
There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.
Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.
So why are our political leaders setting out quite deliberately to deceive us?
There have many disgustingly revealing stories this week about the dubious practices of the Climate Fear Promotion lobby, but for me the most damning of all was Chris Horner’s scoop at Pajamas Mediaconcerning high level cover-ups by the Obama administration. Like his soul mate Dave Cameron on this side of the pond, Obama finds the narrative about global warming so compelling and moving that he doesn’t want it spoiled with any inconvenient truths regarding green jobs and green energy.
Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has discovered that when two European reports came out – the Spanish one above; and another one from Denmark on the inefficiency of wind farms – the Obama administration recruited left-wing lobbyists to attack them.
After two studies refuted President Barack Obama’s assertions regarding the success of Spain’s and Denmark’s wind energy programs, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies.
Via the FOIA request, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has learned that the Department of Energy — specifically the office headed by Al Gore’s company’s former CEO, Cathy Zoi — turned to George Soros’ Center for American Progress and other wind industry lobbyists to help push Obama’s wind energy proposals.
The FOIA request was not entirely complied with, and CEI just filed an appeal over documents still being withheld. In addition to withholding many internal communications, the administration is withholding communications with these lobbyists and other related communications, claiming they constitute “inter-agency memoranda.” This implies that, according to the DoE, wind industry lobbyists and Soros’s Center for American Progress are — for legal purposes — extensions of the government.
We see something similar going on here in Britain. The taxpayer funded Quango The Carbon Trust is continually pumping out propaganda on behalf of the powerful wind energy lobby; as too is the BBC which cheerfully funded a political broadcast (masquerading as a cri de coeur) by Green activist George Moonbat on its The Daily Politics show earlier this week. In December it was discovered that civil servants working for the government had suppressed evidence that wind farms damage health and disrupt sleep.
Do our political leaders think we’re stupid? Or so supine and malleable that we simply won’t mind being lied to if it’s for our “own good”?
Allegheny Treasures 