Wind Farm

[Ross]

Study: Wind Farms Even More Expensive And Pointless Than You Thought

The cost of wind energy is significantly more expensive than its advocates pretend, a new US study has found.

If you believe this chart produced by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), then onshore wind is one of the cheapest forms of power – more competitive than nuclear, coal or hydro, and a lot more than solar.

But when you take into account the true costs of wind, it's around 48 per cent more expensive than the industry's official estimates – according to new research conducted by Utah State University.

"In this study, we refer to the 'true cost' of wind as the price tag consumers and society as a whole pay both to purchase wind-generated electricity and to subsidize the wind energy industry through taxes and government debt," said Ryan Yonk Ph.D., one of the report's authors and a founder of Strata Policy. "After examining all of these cost factors and carefully reviewing existing cost estimates, we were able to better understand how much higher the cost is for Americans."

The peer-reviewed report accounted for the following factors:

The federal Production Tax Credit (PTC), a crucial subsidy for wind producers, has distorted the energy market by artificially lowering the cost of expensive technologies and directing taxpayer money to the wind industry.

States have enacted Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) that require utilities to purchase electricity produced from renewable sources, which drives up the cost of electricity for consumers.
Because wind resources are often located far from existing transmission lines, expanding the grid is expensive, and the costs are passed on to taxpayers and consumers.

Conventional generators must be kept on call as backup to meet demand when wind is unable to do so, driving up the cost of electricity for consumers.

"Innovation is a wonderful thing and renewable energy is no exception. Wind power has experienced tremendous growth since the 1990's, but it has largely been a response to generous federal subsidies," Yonk stated.

Among the factors wind advocates fail to acknowledge, the report shows, is the "opportunity cost" of the massive subsidies which taxpayers are forced to provide in order to persuade producers to indulge in this otherwise grotesquely inefficient and largely pointless form of power generation.

In the US this amounts to an annual $5 billion per year in Production Tax Credits (PTC). Here is money that could have been spent on education, healthcare, defence or, indeed, which could have been left in the pockets of taxpayers to spend as they prefer.

Instead it has been squandered on bribing rent-seeking crony-capitalists to carpet the landscape with bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes to produce energy so intermittent that it is often unavailable when needed most (on very hot or very cold days when demand for air-conditioning or heating is high) and only too available on other occasions when a glut means that wind producers actually have to pay utilities to accept their unwanted energy. This phenomenon, known as "negative pricing", is worthwhile to wind producers because they only get their subsidy credits when they are producing power (whether it is needed or not). But clearly not worthwhile to the people who end up footing the bill: ie taxpayers.

Read more at:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/07/study-wind-farms-even-more-expensive-and-pointless-than-you-thought/

[Ross]

Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain's 'wind rush'?

By TOM LEONARD

A breathtaking sight awaits those who travel to the southernmost tip of Hawaii's stunningly beautiful Big Island, though it's not in any guidebook. On a 100-acre site, where cattle wander past broken 'Keep Out' signs, stand the rusting skeletons of scores of wind turbines.

Just a short walk from where endangered monk seals and Hawksbill turtles can be found on an unspoilt sandy beach, a technology that is supposed to be about saving the environment is instead ruining it.
In other parts of the U.S., working wind turbines are killing hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year, but here the wildlife can perch on the motionless steel blades.

If any spot was tailor-made for a wind farm it would surely be here. The gales are so strong and relentless on the tip of South Point that trees grow almost horizontally.

Yet the 27-year-old Kamaoa Wind Farm remains a relic of the boom and inglorious bust of America's so-called 'wind rush', the world's first major experiment in wind energy.

At a time when the EU and the British Government are fully paid-up evangelists for wind power, the lesson from America — and the ghostly hulks on this far-flung coast — should be a warning of their folly.

Few people were talking about saving the planet back in the early Eighties. The wind rush was a free-for-all in which get-rich-quick companies exploited ridiculously generous tax breaks to pepper  the States with thousands of  wind turbines.

For anyone who has questioned Downing Street's controversial pledge — spurred on by EU green targets — to give £400 million-a-year subsidies to wind farms as well as hefty bribes to landowners in order to spur the building of an additional 4,500 turbines, the wind rush may sound eerily familiar.

Indeed, America's growing band of wind sceptics insist that what happened three decades ago in the U.S. could easily recur over the next few years in the UK if the wheels come off the wind energy gravy train once again.
So what went wrong? It started with the late Seventies oil crisis that convinced America it had to look around for other sources of power. For a time, wind power was considered to be a serious alternative to fossil fuels.

Turbines were built across several states, though there was a preponderance in California, where nearly 17,000 sprouted up from the  dusty earth.

Nearly all of these were concentrated in three giant wind farms: Altamont, east of San Francisco; Tehachapi, on the edge of the Mojave desert; and San Gorgonio near  Palm Springs.

In theory, conditions couldn't have been better. Each of these are passes that benefit from just the right sort of wind that turbines need — strong and almost continual.

Better still, they were crossed by under-used high voltage lines to take away the power.
But most importantly for the scrum of investors who were thrusting their snouts into the trough, there was the extraordinary generosity of the government.

Between 1981 and 1985, federal and state subsidies in California were so favourable that investors could recover 50 per cent of the cost of a wind turbine.

Even better, the amount they were paid for their electricity was tied to the price of oil, which had shot through the roof.

Paul GIPE, a former California wind company executive, calls what happened next a 'tax credit frenzy'.
'The lure of quick riches resulted in shoddy products that littered California with poorly operating — sometimes non-operating — turbines.'
They were expensive and badly designed. Some were far too small to make a difference, others were just clunky machines designed by the aero industry with blades the length of a rugby pitch.
But thanks to the subsidies, it hardly mattered that some of the untested turbines were so sub-standard they barely even worked.
Not to put too fine a point on it, for some wind energy investors it was simply a tax scam.
But as tends to happen with a business that is driven by financial incentives, it lasted only as long as the subsidies. In 1986, the price of oil tumbled and the subsidies started to die out. Suddenly, the wind energy sums didn't add up any more.
And just like the gold rush miners who had rushed to the same Californian passes a century earlier, the wind prospectors departed in such a hurry that they didn't even bother to take down the turbines they had littered across the state.
With so many moving parts to worry about, maintaining turbines is expensive — too expensive when the electricity they could produce was suddenly worth so little.
'So when something broke, you simply didn't send a repairman because it just didn't make financial sense,' Hawaii wind sceptic Andrew Walden told me.
With some turbine makers going out of business, there were no spare parts either.
According to the California Energy Commission, the collapse in subsidies stalled the state's huge wind energy industry for nearly two decades.
No one who has driven past one of America's mega wind farms today can fail to be struck by how few have blades that are turning, even in strong winds.
The truth is that even fewer may be producing electricity than it appears. Many are switched to a mode in which the blades continue to turn just to keep oil moving around the mechanism, but no electricity is produced.
Unfortunately, the frenzy of windmill building during the wind rush didn't just ruin the view, but also devastated the wildlife.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html#ixzz48A7uIreu

[Ross]

If and when the Wind Farm wears out or is knocked down by a tornado or any other disaster, or is abandonment by Enel (the owner)because subsidies go away, will all the taxpayers across Elk County be responsible for the clean up.

Clean up will be very expensive !

I'm asking about this because some people think it is the responsibility of all Elk County , and that to repair the Swimming Pool owned by the City of Howard, and for repair of the various communities roads and other infrastructure.

Will a clean-up be the responsibility of the landlords who are reaping a great deal of wealth  or everyone else?

Will the County Government continue the Socialist action of giving away more FREE MONEY ?

[redcliffsw]

It's too late.  The goverment supported wind farm is already there.  The Founders never involved the government in a business or such a fiasco.