More failures of wind energy

While wind energy is being wildly supported by many in the U.S., there have always been drawbacks to the performance and costs of these machines. The U.S. has had a heavily subsidized romance with them for nearly 40 years and too few of the state and federal policy makers have taken a close look at what the tens of billions in subsidies have actually done for the taxpayers.

These wind energy programs have made many companies such as Florida Power and Light very wealthy because of the heavy subsidies, tax credits, and accelerated depreciation allowance. Additional benefits come from local taxing authorities. This source of energy remains very unreliable and limited, having produced only about 1% of the nation's energy for decades.

Such companies are far less interested in windmills than in the legalized tax evasion programs at their disposal. There is little promise that this will improve in the future, for the simple reason that the wind remain unpredictable, unreliable, and intermittent. For example, during the years of 2002 and 2003, Florida Power and light owner of the majority of windmills in the US did not pay any taxes on revenues of more than $2 billion dollars. It was estimated that FPL took more than $1.2 billion in deductions during those two years, avoiding payments of hundreds of millions in taxes. You and I paid those for them.

Remarkably, even after all this time such tax evasion programs are wildly supported by state legislatures, Congress, the media, the greens, and too many state and federal agencies. Many states now have the onerous Renewable Portfolio Standards which require utilities to have a sizable fraction (often 20%) of their energy sales to be from "renewable" energy sources such as wind energy. That is, state legislators require that its citizens to pay the taxes for large corporations. We are not being protected from our own government's costly edicts.

In a sophisticated computerized electrified world the demand for highly reliable electrical voltages and frequencies are paramount. These are features which wind energy cannot provide. Variable wind energy provides notoriously unstable voltages and frequencies. Wind mills normally require very reliable backup energy from non-wind sources. The backup systems need to be operating in what is called "spinning reserve" so they can be available very quickly should the wind die down.

Simultaneously the European countries have indulged their weaknesses for politically correct wind energy as well. After many decades a number of them are beginning to get the whiff of something going wrong with this failed energy strategy. (https://tinyurl.com/4yfh7k).

The Brits seemingly have headed down this road even further than the US, with plans to expand their wind capacity 3-fold to around 25 GW(e). A large Columbia River dam in Washington can be of 1-3 GW(e) capacity for comparison. British utilities and companies won't build them unless those same massive subsidies are in place. The unspoken message here is that after 4 decades of windmills, they are still impressively uneconomical. They don't make enough energy and sales revenue to be economically viable. Currently just 2% of England's energy comes from renewables, with just 0.5 GW(e) coming from windmills. Just one turbine (of many) at Washington State's Grand Coulee Dam produces that much.

We must also keep in mind that all megawatts and gigawatts are not equal. They refer only to the capacity of the generators, not to the amount of energy they produce. The energy produced depends upon the availability of energy from the generator which in the case of windmills is usually 30% of the time or less. Today's nuclear plants, for example, are available about 90% of the time on an annual basis.

The new British plans call for the installation of more than 7000 wind turbines, which as Glover and Economides point out, is one every half mile around Britain's entire coastline. Talk about environmental eyesores and desecration.

More realistic wind groups in Britain are expressing serious doubts about this new program. Some of the problems include the warning that private capital will not be forthcoming, since the windmills are not economically viable and poor generators of revenues.

Another Brit, Dan Lewis of the British Economic Research Council, warns that the"British government is deluding itself on a grand scale". Jim Oswald, a British consulting engineer, advises that over-reliance on wind energy will result in major power failures across the nation and an increase of up to 50% in electrical bills. Also see this website (www.windaction.org) for a broader picture of wind problems.

The people of Germany are also expressing their own concerns about wind energy, for the same reason, unreliability. Additionally, the windmills are also proving to be unreliable due to mechanical failures. Windmill manufacturers' claims that they will last for 20 years is proving inaccurate. This unreliability is proving to be a deterrent to investors if not to the policy makers in Germany. Investing one's own money in these machines rather than millions in other people's money (OPM) called subsidies, clears the mind wonderfully.

The earthly heaven on Earth, as far as the windmill lobby is concerned, is Denmark. They manufacture a sizeable share of the world's wind turbines. We are also told that Denmark gets 20% of its energy from wind power. That is misleading. Because of the well known variability of wind, the Danes are heavily dependent upon Sweden and Norway who take much of the Danes excess production. In 2003 Denmark exported 84% of its wind production because it could not handle the highly variable energy in its own transmission system. The variabilities introduce voltage and frequency instabilities which can not be easily handled in Denmark.

As is the case in most parts of the world there are huge subsidies there, too. The subsidies in Denmark are so heavy that even the media are beginning to scrutinize the costs and subsidies of wind turbines. We can only dream of "what might have been" if we had had such a professionally vigilant media in our own nation for these past 30 years. Billions of dollars in subsidized wind powered boondoggles and the resulting legalized tax evasions might have been avoided. The many false promises would have been discovered sooner as well.

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