Actually, Not That Hard to Figure Out

This person is confused about why the sign below would have been put up.

I can help out by explaining, ma'am.  There is essentially no economic justification for wind power in most of the places it is being "used."  It is expensive, noisy, and inefficient.  It uses, if you account for the costs of placing, repairing, and decommissioning the wind "farms," and putting out fires, FAR more energy than it produces.  There were questions from the outset, as here.   If you actually wanted relatively safe, clean energy, you'd favor nuclear power, as here.  Wind power is actually dangerous, in addition to being a waste of money.

Thus, the only reason that states and counties get all tarted up in red lipstick and short skirts to attract those wind-sailors is the federal and state subsidies, which are enormous distortions of actual investment incentives.  That is, you can "make money," but only by pimping out your land to create noise, fire, and environmental damage.  There is no energy payoff, so you are just doing it for the quick subsidy cash.  I hope that clears it up, ma'am, and perhaps you should read something other than Daily Kos-titute.

(Nod to RWA)

Green Energy Chronicles

This would be funny, if it weren't so not at all funny.

In particular:

 A website of the U.S. Department of Energy, Wind Powering America, describes how schools can receive taxpayer funding for wind projects.  The site provides links to wind-friendly educational materials from Canada, California, Idaho, the Dakotas, Montana, and Arizona.

Wind companies and their trade groups are also involved. In Ontario, my province, teachers are asked how they feel about corporate logos in schools in exchange for such “benefits” as free computers. The response is often negative, but industrial-wind propaganda abounds in textbooks, learning materials, and kid-friendly websites.

It's true.  The jerks who were opening mortgage origination shops in strip malls in 2006 are all now "working" in the the green energy industry.  And wind power may be the biggest rip-off of all.  Solar power is just expensive and inefficient, but at least it produces some small amount of power.  Wind power is actually a complete fraud.

Wind Power Fail

Measuring the Environmental Benefits of Wind Power

Joseph Cullen
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming

Abstract: Production subsidies for renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, are rationalized due to their perceived environmental benefits. Subsidizing these projects allows clean, renewable technologies to produce electricity that otherwise would have been produced by dirtier, fossil-fuel power plants. In this paper, I quantify the emissions offset by wind power for a large electricity grid in Texas using the randomness inherent in wind power availability. The results indicate that one MWh of wind power offsets negligible quantities of SO2, less than one lb of NOx, and less than half a ton of CO2.  Only for high estimates of the social costs of pollution do I find that the value of emissions offset by wind power are greater than the renewable energy subsidies used to induce investment in wind farms.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

60 knots.... in a SAILboat

About 70mph, powered only by wind.


If you think it looks like it's flying...it can actually fly.  That's not so good.

Biggest Environmental Heretic Gets Pounds!

From KPC friend Matt Ridley.

Read all about it.

Thanks to Tommy the Tenured Brit

Two Cheers for "Windfall"

New movie on wind power. It seems that the left has finally discovered that the alternative energy "industry" (sic) is "all about the money."

Folks, there IS no alternative energy industry. There is a rent-seeking, subsidy-sucking-down industry, and the people who work in that industry are smart, hard-working, and relentless. In 2007, they were mortgage loan originators. Now, they are windfarm contractors.

In this trailer for the movie (two cheers for the movie; not three cheers, but two cheers) you will see the problem documented.
They get a lot right, but the problem is that the problem has to be "it's all about the money." Um, no. The problem is that this was NEVER about the money, in the sense of real cost per KWHr. It's about the subsidies.

If it were about the money, the only reason we would have solar, or wind, or whatever, "alternative energy" is if those technologies actually produced power at competitive rates.

Instead, all of the "alternative energy" pirates were just after the subsidies. Everybody in the industry knows that the negative externalities of wind power, combined with its operating costs (at least twice, and ofter as much as FOUR times, the cost of electricity now generated through conventional means), make wind energy uneconomical. So the corporations that are acting this way are fooling people into accepting a pittance to put a turbine on their land, taking the enormous subsidy from Mr. Obama and Mr. Reid, and then skedaddling. There was never any hope of this being a viable energy source, at least not with existing technology. It's too expensive, dangerous, and noisy.

That's where "the money" comes in, or where it SHOULD come in. Suppose you have two technologies, C and W. C uses certain resources, produces certain externalities, and produces a certain amount of power. W uses quite different resources, produces externalities, and produces a certain amount of power. Which one is "better"?

For a command system, there is no way of knowing. The problem is that (1) there is no price information to help you know which system uses the fewest resources. (2) Given a decision to subsidize, that "price" swamps all the information that could have been inferred from people who actually know something about power generation technology.

Here's the thing. It's a theorem.

The system that costs least uses the fewest resources.

The only way, the ONLY way, to add up resources is to sum the opportunity costs that using them in one way precludes for other uses. The only way to sum opportunity costs is to use price. Now, it doesn't matter at all what UNITs the prices are stated in.  And it may be hard to account for externalities, because those often aren't priced. But if externalities are hard for markets to price, why do we think that governments, dominated by rent-seekers who want subsidies for useless crap like wind turbines, will do any better?  If anything governments are likely WORSE at pricing externalities accurately. There is no force on earth that can change the fact that the alternative that costs less uses fewer resources, or less valued resources, or produces more power.

The king of the tax / subsidy paradigm, A.C. Pigou, actually foresaw this in 1920. This is not Coase, or Stigler, or Tollison, mind you. This is PIGOU:
It is not sufficient to contrast the imperfect adjustments of unfettered enterprise with the best adjustment that economists in their studies can imagine. For we cannot expect that any State authority will attain, or even wholeheartedly seek, that ideal. Such authorities are liable alike to ignorance, to sectional pressure, and to personal corruption by private interest. A loud-voiced part of their constituents, if organized for votes, may easily outweigh the whole.

Why would you think that the government can get prices right for externalities? Why do you think the government WANTS to get prices right, given how much money there is to be made from campaign contributions from rent-seekers?