End of tax credit a blow for wind power industry
Up to 37,000 jobs, many in Illinois, could be lost as projects are halted or abandoned
By Julie Wernau, Chicago Tribune reporter
The wind power industry is predicting massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects after a deal to renew a tax credit failed Thursday in Washington.
The move is expected to have major ramifications in states such as Illinois, where 13,892 megawatts of planned wind projects — enough to power 3.3 million homes per year — are seeking to be connected to the electric grid. Many of those projects will be abandoned or significantly delayed without federal subsidies.
The state is home to more than 150 companies that support the wind industry. At least 67 of those make turbines or components for wind farms. Chicago is the U.S. headquarters to more than a dozen major wind companies that wanted to take advantage of powerful Midwestern winds.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0217-wind-ptc–20120217,0,7153601.story
h/t to CRS, DrPH
But according to Obama more people on unemployment is good for job creation. Lay me off – for the good of the country!
The yearly output of wind power is slightly below 20% of the total installed wind power in Germany and daily fluctiations sometimes are quite high. Without the the high prices (about a factor of three to conventional gas or coal power systems) defined by the government wind power would not be successfull.
Does Julie Wernau understand what she is writing about, I wonder?
3.3million homes **per year**. What is this supposed to mean? You power 3.3m homes or you don’t. The “per year” statement is nonsense, and it is a nonsense that is repeated time and again by reporters in this field.
Immaterial of what the industry is, be it auto, donkey carts or wind turbines, if it is subsidised then it will eventually fail.
Meanwhile in California…
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 16 (UPI) — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it is investigating the deaths of two federally protected golden eagles at a California wind farm.
The two eagles were discovered Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reported.
A total of eight eagles have been found dead at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Pine Tree wind farm, located 100 miles north of Los Angeles in the Tehachapi Mountains, the newspaper said.
Federal wildlife officials said the first six eagles were struck by blades from the turbines at the wind farm, which features 90 turbines spread across 8,000 acres.
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/02/16/Golden-eagles-found-dead-at-wind-farm/UPI-63441329417887/#ixzz1mdbrQXXt
As soon as the subsidies stop windfarms and wind power are abandoned. Windfarms are nothing to do with power generation. They are effective money laundering schemes for feeding taxpayers money to favored individuals.
Re:
“The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind…”
Surely “Idiot wind” (“Blood on the Tracks”) ?!
Don’t forget the Montana Supreme Court decision against ‘Our Children’s Trust’ in June 2011.
First prove in a lower court that carbon dioxide emissions cause damage and thus climate change.
Reported by Climate Physics Institute which opposed the petition.
I will give you tax credits for wind if you give me the keystone xl pipeline.
We wait with bated breath here in the UK for the ‘greenest government ever’ to succumb to reality, and start following Illinois’s lead.
Problem is, our PM’s father-in-law is in receipt of serious subsidy monies for the wind farms on his land – so David Cameron is in a bit of a cleft stick… Do the decent thing for the poor suffering energy consumers, or get an ear-bashing from Samantha..?
Step in the right direction (albeit ten years too late) – he has today signed an agreement in France with Sarkozy to develop new nuclear power station in the UK.
Anyway – as Churchill said (approximately): ‘This is not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end; but it is the end of the beginning…’
Face it, the wind energy busineess is simply not sustainable.
ecoGuy says:
February 17, 2012 at 3:32 am
Meanwhile in California…
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 16 (UPI) — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it is investigating the deaths of two federally protected golden eagles at a California wind farm.
—
It’s the new “Silent Spring”. Wind Farms = DDT.
By the way, where IS R. Gates?? I wanted to ask him if NCAR has gone “off the grid” yet with their own private wind farm and solar power arrays…
Since the land has been polluted by wind farms, one might as well build nukes there?
I think the tide has changed.
One of the main drivers for alternate energy is our desire to free us from the balance of payments problem of having to pay for foreign oil. Done correctly (not that that’s actually the case) a lot of green jobs could be created and all the money would stay in the country. Such an argument will be very attractive to politicians. Global warming can be viewed as a ‘useful fiction’ to promote the goal of energy self-sufficiency by scaring the population away from oil.
Once the politicians realize that, in Obama’s words,
“We are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas”, the need for alternate energy goes away. We can have energy self-sufficiency without the trouble and sacrifice required by wind, solar and biomass. People who used to push global warming as a ‘useful fiction’ will quietly back away. We’re not going to see folks apologizing for being wrong. In fact, politicians being what they are, we can still expect them to give lip service to global warming so they don’t alienate their base. What will happen though is that they will no longer do much to push their former agenda.
One hopeful sign: T. Boone Pickens has switched from advocating wind power to promoting natural gas.
Just a link:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0309/Budget-hawks-Does-US-need-to-give-gas-and-oil-companies-41-billion-a-year
“Chicago is the U.S. headquarters to more than a dozen major wind companies that wanted to take advantage of powerful
Midwestern winds, albeit crooked politicians and fat government subsidies.”Fixed
Paulino,
I fully agree. Let’s eliminate all energy subsidies. Then the monumentally stupid windmills will be eliminated as well.
And you ignore the fact that oil companies pay much more in taxes than the total of subsidies and shareholder dividends combined. Of course, not being a hypocrite, you do not use oil company products. Right?
Imagine 20-30 years from now when these gargantuan structures are nothing but useless, rusting hulks littering the countryside. One day there will come a time of accounting for all this waste and foolishness. People who are now children will by then be grown adults and be faced with this awful blight. They will wonder what form of madness possessed their elders.
The amount of tax payer money squandered on failed solar and wind projects constitutes gross negligence and dereliction of duty. It’s time to clean house in the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
Why does it not surprise me that when you read the whole story, the details do not live up to the hype in the headlines?
That would be because it seems everything related to the green industry/green jobs is hyped.
“Immediately at risk in Illinois are 15 wind projects totaling 3,292 MWs that have county-level permits. In general, since developers don’t bother going through the county permitting process unless they are serious about a project, the number of permitted megawatts is usually seen as a good indicator of near-term growth.”
So the HEF(Headline Exaggeration Factor) is >4.
But on the bright side, at least they didn’t use the CAGW practices. Had they done that, they would have reported millions of MW after applying a hokey stick growth curve and projected out to 2100!
Smokey says:
February 17, 2012 at 5:08 am
To Paulino…
“Of course, not being a hypocrite, you do not use oil company products. Right?”
Smokey, don’t expect him/her to answer that. It’s like asking the climate elites about their BILLIONS of dollars in government funding while they wring their hands about the Heartland Institute. Stony silence. Can’t say that I blame the climate elites – I’d be embarrassed too.
By the way, Brent crude spiked over $120/barrel yesterday:
Brent tops $120 on Iran, North Sea, Greece
Reuters) – Brent crude rose on Thursday for a fourth day in a row, topping $120 a barrel at settlement — an eight-month high — on worries about supply from Iran and from the North Sea, where output was expected to dip next month.
—
Guess who is against the Keystone Pipeline….
Just as I wrote
http://floppingaces.net/2011/11/21/without-subsidies-wind-tubines-stop-turning-reader-post/
1. About the article and its numbers. I think they’re convenient wind lobby numbers. The first thing these “investigative journalists” do is go ask the activists and repeat it as fact. (Taught that way. My niece did a piece on the coal industry using Sierra Club talking points which was very popular with her journalism professors.)
2. The Pickens plan is wind and natural gas. Left foot / Right foot. He wants the subsidies. He wants the power of eminent domain. He wants it all.
3. This will be – if not already while I write this – an Obama talking point to counter (37,000) the Keystone pipeline criticism (20,000). It will work on a lot of people despite the facts. Government pain killers are a lot like Oxycontin – highly addictive by creating pain when it starts to go away.
I was rummaging around the web, looking for information on broken turbines. low and behold, I found this !
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/19/the-reality-of-wind-turbines-in-california-video/
It appears the construction quality of wind turbines is ‘variable’, judging from some turbines lasting 20 years. I suspect the quality of most turbines is likely to be compromised by efforts to minimise cost.
I was also looking for Russian wind farms that might have been disabled by snow storms, not an easy task ! my search led me to conclude that windpower is a very fledgling industry in Russia (lucky them). let’s hope they learn from the numerous windpower mistakes of western nations.
http://en.rian.ru/Environment/20101112/161303912.html
It will now be interesting to see how viable the companies feel their own technology is, in the real world.