This letter was submitted to the Cape Cod Times newspaper in response to the report claiming the Cape Wind project will save $4.6 billion in costs to New England over 25 years of operation.

Investment bankers are all aflutter with the onset of stimulus money for renewable energy projects according to the August 31 Wall Street Journal. After a long lag, numerous firms have again invested upwards of $100 million in wind farms. Investors are attracted by the quick returns made possible by the hefty federal grants and tax benefits. The growing subsidies for wind power mask wind's high cost and inherent limitations, but only for so long. ...Although appealing to many, wind power is an extremely expensive, inefficient, and unreliable source of electricity, incapable of providing base load power. Wind's intermittency, variability, line loss, necessary back-up generation, transmission needs, and dispatch complexity limit the amount of electricity wind can secure.

The tax-dodging Treasury secretary and the chief of the unconstitutional department of energy announced more than half of a billion dollars in unconstitutional government handouts to energy companies this week, most of which will go toward expensive, inefficient wind power through a foreign-owned company. And this is just the "first round." Under the guise of "creating jobs" and "clean energy," this portion of the $54 billion allocated for energy in the "stimulus package" is expected to eventually siphon more than $3 billion from the productive economy - killing a great number of jobs in the process.

Cap-and-trade schemes could hurt families and send jobs overseas The recently passed U.S. House bill to create a cap-and-trade system to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions threatens to hurt families and send jobs out of the country, argues Washington state Rep. Shelly Short, R-Addy. In Washington state, the definition of 'green jobs' is ill defined.

Friday, in a text book example of bad governance, the House of Representatives passed by the slimmest of margins what is believed to be the largest tax bill in United States history. Not a single one of the 219 representatives who voted for it knew exactly what was in the bill. The major part of the bill is its Cap and Trade provisions.

Despite expensive and extensive green-job policies, a surprisingly low number of jobs were created. And about two-thirds of those "green" jobs were just to set up the energy source, in construction, fabrication, installation, marketing and administration. Only 10 percent of the green jobs created were permanent jobs actually operating and maintaining the renewable sources of energy. Each wind industry job created in Spain required a subsidy of about $1.4 million.

Excuse me if I'm not quite as excited about a cap and trade tax on my electricity as wind enthusiast Joe Richardson is. I believe I'll side with the North Dakota Legislature and the Industrial Commission, who want to see hard-and-fast numbers about what the true cost of a cap and trade tax is to the North Dakota economy.

The renewable energy source is all the rage in Texas, growing by 60 percent last year alone. It's a fave of the federal government ...According to one federal estimate, wind generators get more than $23 in federal incentives for every megawatt they produce. That compares with 25 cents for natural gas, 44 cents for coal and $1.59 for nuclear power. ...Texas is also working on another state sweetener for wind - almost $5 billion of new transmission lines.

Green energy has been on the subsidy take for years, including in 2005 when Mr. Delahunt was calling for "an Apollo project for alternative energy sources, for hybrid engines, for biodiesel, for wind and solar and everything else." The reality is that all such projects are only commercially viable because of political patronage. Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf ran the numbers and found that the effective tax rate for wind is minus-163.8%. In other words, every dollar a wind firm spends is subsidized to the tune of 64 cents from the government.

Babcock and Brown Wind is formally cutting its ties with the Babcock and Brown funeral procession but the spirit of the financial engineers still blows hard through the wind farm owner - and perhaps not to the benefit of shareholders. ...BBW's rationale for putting its best wind farms up for sale last year was bemusing from the start. Basically the management would have shareholders believe they were ''selling the farm to prove the farm was worth owning''. BBW phrased it slightly differently, saying it was out to ''demonstrate and capture value''.

There isn't much doubt that Congress and incoming President Barack Obama will try to impose some kind of limits on carbon emissions. The Republicans, girding in opposition, are denouncing global warming as a fraud, and claiming that either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system will impose an unacceptable burden on the economy. ...Wind generation is the prime example of what can go wrong when the government decides to pick winners. The idea that it can replace significant quantities of coal or natural gas in electrical generation is a fantasy.

The domestic auto industry isn't the only uncompetitive industry that seems to require life-sustaining transfusions of government cash to stay in business. Alternative energy sources have relied on such subsidies, called "investments," for years. Yet in President-elect Obama's announcement of his energy team, we were told "the foundations of our energy independence" lie in "the power of wind and solar." ...After decades of tax credits and subsidies, wind provides only about 1% of our electricity. By comparison, coal provides 49%, natural gas 22%, nuclear power 19% and hydroelectric 7%.

Once a booming industry thanks to sky-high oil prices, the feel-good trend, carbon reduction and subsidies, the financial crisis has pushed investors to give up on green energies, and like the dot-com bubble of 2000, some analysts say it's about to burst. ..."I think economic reality will kill the green industry," said Mr. Buckee, who now lives in Britain and lectures on climate change. Solar energy isn't alone in its woes. Wind, biomass, biofuel and other "clean-tech" companies are getting pasted too as the financial crisis sends investors fleeing from technology names, dries up credit and freezes the IPO market.

[W]e are being urged to support the construction of massive wind turbine farms all over this country. Why are these developers so eager to build these massive inefficient industrial complexes? Because our state and federal government are offering lucrative tax incentives to build them. Where do you suppose this money will come from? The taxpayers. These international companies hire public relations firms to market their product. They love to use buzzwords such as: green energy, renewable energy, carbon exchange, global warming, etc., to lure you into thinking wind turbines are the answer to our energy needs.

Pickens' plan is basically a couple of pie charts showing how he'd like to see the U.S. energy economy work. ...He gives no specifics publicly, but he's made it clear that it's up to Congress, not consumers or investors, to make this vision become reality. Because Pickens has announced his gambit in the name of the environment, the media have dropped the skepticism they usually apply to the claims of businessmen trying to make a buck. Because his plan involves government - meaning you and I pay the costs - that skepticism ought to be even greater.

Oil man T. Boone Pickens recently announced his own large program to help get America off its oil addictions. His message in his own Texas twang starts off appealing, while he properly and accurately reports on the $700 billion annually we now spend on imported oil, now at 70% of our total oil consumption. ...Regrettably, near the middle of his advertisement T. Boone wandered off into an alternative energy universe, proposing that wind and solar energy replace the current 22% of our electricity produced by natural gas. Neither source is a true alternative, and are merely erratic, unreliable, supplementary energy sources.

Much has been written about the merits or demerits of wind energy as a viable source of electricity generation for meeting the growing needs of electricity consumption in the United States. No matter which side of the debate one comes down on, one issue is crystal clear. Trillions of taxpayer dollars are being poured into the wind energy corporations' coffers to enhance the return on investment strategies with a guaranteed commitment by federal, state and local governments for a 10-year period. According to a recent report by the National Renewable Technology Laboratory (DOE), wind energy could account for 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030. To reach this target, wind turbines would have to produce 300,000 MW of power or 1,000,000 MW installed capacity. The 500,000 plus wind turbines would cost the taxpayers between $5-7 trillion.

As the Senate opens debate on its mammoth carbon regulation program this week, the phrase of the hour is "cap and trade." This sounds innocuous enough. But anyone who looks at the legislative details will quickly see that a better description is cap and spend. This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax. ...If Congress is really going to impose this carbon tax in the name of saving mankind, the least it should do is forego all of this political largesse. In return for this new tax, Congress should cut taxes elsewhere to make the bill revenue neutral.

As they [the American Wind Energy Association] well know, "installed capacity" is meaningless, since the output of industrial wind turbines cannot be stored and cannot be predicted or regulated. Their effective or useable capacity is near zero, while the effective capacity of coal, gas and nuclear plants is near 99%. When the public figures this out, I doubt that "85% of Americans" will continue to support wind energy.