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
Hmmmmm……did they project 37,000 jobs being CREATED with the subsidies when first proposed?
My money says that the jobs “lost” exceeds the jobs actually created…..
Arnold Ring (@ArnoldRing) says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:40 am
[About efficiency increases in gas power plants by adding wind turbines]
“Efficiency is measured by ratio of input costs to output energy.”
Well, I am used to the definition of efficiency of combustion; i.e. what percentage of the fuel’s energy content is transformed into usable energy. What you mean is cost effectiveness, I would say.
” When the wind is blowing, fuel is not being burnt. There are added costs from wind such as starting and stopping gas power generation. There are added capital costs. The method is to predict wind output continually and balance that wind prediction against gas power output and expected demand. An additional saving by using wind is reduced exposure to gas price volatility. No use in a place with a low wind capacity factor or lacking matching peaking gas power gen. Works better in a place with demand power pricing.”
Well well. Theoretically and given a high gas price, that’s possible, but again you don’t provide numbers, and you don’t provide real world examples of gas power plant operators who “increase their efficiency” by adding some non-subsidized wind turbines.
And yes, I do know that, for instance, German energy giants RWE and Eon have some renewable energy thingies, but those are of course subsidized – I doubt they would have done it without subsidies.
Examples and NUMBERS really would help your case.
Idk – I’ve just had a look at the “United States Annual Average Wind Power” mapped published at http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/maps/chap2/2-01m.html and see that Illinois is barely covered by Wind Power of Class 2 (of 7).
I think that the only “powerful midwestern wind” in Illinois was that generated by the enormous sucking from the Illinois Tax Payer’s wallets…
Market forces distorted to the max….
As ancillary energy near the end user, wind or solar energy can simply allow the end user to draw less power from the grid. That’s a good thing as it saves the user money and lower the draw from the grid.
But, as a major source on which the grid has to rely, it just plain sucks. Germany has been learning the hard way that using large amounts of wind power on the grid produces constantly changing loads and burns out the grid while being adjusted almost minute to minute. It is certainly more trouble than it’s worth. It is only the subsidies and the political will to promote this lousy form of energy that makes them exist at all. Wind power is so 1700s.
What few know is that wind energy can only be transported effectively 50 miles. AND, the icing on the cake is that wind, even more than solar, is the least green energy on the planet. From the land use, the infrastructure, the materials and rare elements, the composites which cannot be recycled, to the maintenance (including regular blade washing and de-icing) and the intermittent energy production, wind power is worthless. I’m not even mentioning the effects on humans and animals living near wind turbines.
There are currently 14,000 defunct wind turbines in the US. The habit when they stop working is to simply abandon them.
Power of the wind varies contiuously. It is never constant. You therefore have to have a back up system which can also switch on and off simultaneously. This is the smart grid where ‘alternative energy sources’ can be used to reduce fossil fuel energy sources by this ‘instant’ switching technique. Alternatively, we could stop funding all climate work and divert that money in the search for efficient storage systems and LTR power stations. Sadly the lunies are currently running the asylum so it won’t happen. Need to get rid of chief luny this autumn
@Paulino
It seems you’ve put some thought into the costs to the public from utility companies’ use of coal to generate electricity, however, have you considered that it’s the public that demands the electricity in the first place and therefore the rightful owner of those costs. Why aren’t car companies required to pay a tax proportional to the costs associated with car crashes?
The benefits to the public of having electricity as cheaply as possible far out weigh the costs of coal usage.
Camasinian says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:54 pm
“So why are they shutting down? They can still take advantage of the powerful midwestern winds. Or, were they more interested in taking advantage of the taxpayer funded subsidies and tax breaks?”
Perfect Shot! Hole In One!!!
Where does the rare earth elements used in wind turbines come from? Which nation controls the majority of the world’s supply of rare earth elements, and how much of the market do they control?
Unless we can find a better source of rare earth elements, wind and solar make us less energy secure, not more.
If energy security and energy independence is important, we should be developing our domestic energy resources. We have an abundance of coal, natural gas and oil (especially when you consider non-conventional sources such as oil shale and tar sands), enough to power this country for centuries.
I feel such unease entering this debate as I am clearly dwarfed intellectually when it comes to physics and climate science. I have often switched from this site to Skeptical Science and back again in an attempt to track the debate (at least I accept there IS a debate still). More often than not the argument drifts into ad hom attack and pithy self congratulations on both sides.
The two camps also appear to mirror political beliefs. No doubt the majority of ‘alarmists’ are lefties and the majority of ‘deniers’ are right wingers. So where does the science come in?
We are told to accept the theory that human induced CO2 causes warming. Whether that’s ‘catastrophic’ or ‘insubstantial’ seems to currently occupy the main front of the war. The largest and most respected scientific communities, we are told, also support one side over the other, which leads to accusations of corruption and ulterior motive (this I simply can’t reconcile).
We are also told that one camp is funded by vested interest (big oil) which works to confuse and confound the public while the other is supported by Governments and NGO’s who work transparently and responsibly based on scientific consensus (yes, I understand that science has nothing to do with consensus etc).
My main problem is this;
While all this debate is going on in the blogsphere…there are some serious actions being taken by Governments all around the world with extraordinary consequence (someone has to do some comprehensive studies as to what’s happening in Africa with their imposed aversion to industrializion). It would appear that one side has already won the war while a series of inconsequential battles still flare up in pockets (like climategate, Scientists switching sides ie Vahrenholt/Stopa, carbon exchange collapse, wind farm/solar plant failures etc).
While I do all I can to keep up with the science and the debate….I am only one man. At some point I have to trust those who know more than me to ‘make the big decisions’ for me.
One thing I do know; Without industrialising…Africa is screwed. Why does no one care about that? Did Bono ruin it for everyone?
Tim:
In general I tend to agree with your sentiments. However, I see an assymetry in how you present the two sides. You should try re-reading and then re-writing your statement so that any positive or negative attributes are mirrored by the other side. For example, it is true that fossil fuel producers have vested interests. But then so do NGO, academics and governments.
I assume you recognize just how pro-environment many if not most skeptics are. Anthony Watts is a very good example of this.
As to allowing others to “make the big decisions” for you – OK, if their interests are owned up to and you always have the option of auditing the basis for the decision by those who are also qualified, i.e., “trust but verify”.
Thanks for the Debunking the Palestine Lie,DirkH (February 17, 2012 at 11:04 am). Saw that one a while ago. I know this isn’t a political blog, but I’ve often thought that the AGW scam would not have been possible without a number of “dry runs” involving information and causes that are patently absurd, unjust and false and yet with the help of governments, social movements, the arts and media cartels, become accepted as the gospel truth. The dry-runs, I think, include the ban on DDT, the “ozone hole” and “palestinianism,” which turned the Arab world’s attempts to annihilate the Jews and their history into a romantic risistance or liberation movement by a 1960s KGB-PLO co-creation, the “Palestinians.” Once we bought into these notions, whose fraudulent nature and sheer harm should have been obvious, we were clearly ready for the next big act, the transfer of billions to new technology cartels and Third World governments, and the destruction of West’s energy and industrial base. Funnily enough, our good old friend, the UN, has its paws in all of these shams. Speaking of cost analyses, someone needs to do one on the UN.
How about powering those low-volume “nodding” oil pumps one sees here and there? A battery could store twenty (say) minutes worth of power to smooth out the ups and downs. Pumping would shut down when the battery was pooped.
The details of the anti-renewable case have been posted on prior threads on this topic. (WUWT should set up a FAQ, with the assistance of volunteers, consisting of answers, culled from past threads, to 101 queries, such as “What’s wrong with wind power?”, etc.
Maybe the installers are sophisticated, but the activists and politicians who’ve pushed them through aren’t, and have fudged over the downsides, based on what I’ve read here.
US houses these days are typically built with a main breaker box that has two line phases giving nominally 220 Volts at 200 Amps each. That comes to 44 kW in my calculator. And it could be more than that if you wanted threephase power to run a swimming pool pump system.
900 Watts won’t run my wife’s radiant heater, but it will run every light in the house ten times over.
I all LED house.
Ok, it’s snowing here finally and chicken is on for the Friday feast.
No wonder so many are abandoned:
“What kind of platform is a wind turbine set in?
The steel tower is anchored in a platform of more than a thousand tons of concrete and steel rebar, 30 to 50 feet across and anywhere from 6 to 30 feet deep. Shafts are sometimes driven down farther to help anchor it. Mountain tops must be blasted to accommodate it. The platform is critical to stabilizing the immense weight of the turbine assembly.
How much do wind turbines weigh?
In the GE 1.5-megawatt model, the nacelle alone weighs more than 56 tons, the blade assembly weighs more than 36 tons, and the tower itself weighs about 71 tons — a total weight of 164 tons. The corresponding weights for the Vestas V90 are 75, 40, and 152, total 267 tons; and for the Gamesa G87 72, 42, and 220, total 334 tons. ”
http://www.wind-watch.org/faq-size.php
I think that they would make dandy shelters, condos, research stations, bird houses, cell towers storage bins and sky high restaurants. I think I would like to live 200-300 feet aloft saying hello to the passing raptors!
The US gets little oil (20%?) from the Middle East. Most comes from Nigeria, Venezuela, Canada, and domestic wells. (And we don’t have oil-related military efforts in those places.)
Our strategic interest in the Middle East is (supposedly, anyway) to promote democracy and deter ideological fanaticism (that was a powerful contributing factor to our involvement in WWI, WWII, and the cold war), to protect Israel, to quash Al Quada (which attacked us), and to deter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to regimes headed by madmen.
TIM from NZ said, “I feel such unease entering this debate as I am clearly dwarfed intellectually when it comes to physics and climate science” (February 17, 2012 at 12:27 pm).
Ha! You and me, bro! However, as you noticed, there are many paths to skepticism on this topic, not all of them reliying on the science behind the issues. In my case, I became repulsed by the propaganda in the early 2000s because the promotion, the arguments, stridency and mendacity reminded me so much of the shite we were spoonfed in once-commie Eastern Europe. Also, once I looked at the argument, I couldn’t understand how a warming trend could be bad. I’m a history buff and know that all warming trends in our past were closely followed by revolutionary cultural and civilizational changes. Agriculture, Greek civilization, Fertile Crescent booms, Rome, the Medieval agricultural and technological revolutions. Cold periods, on the other hand were followed by the “Four Horsemen;” war, pestillence, famine. Not to forget overall insanities like massacres, witch burnings, persecution of Jews and heretics and enslavement of entire nations and classes of people.
Nor did I buy the huge stretch of credibility required where new and still immature computer models concocted by a small circle of technocrats supposedly predicted not only a warming far into the future, but that it would be disastrous for us…without so much as one good example or proof. And sure enough, “remedies” involving our impoverishment were instantly offered aggressively and with the power of the state and financial catels; another red flag there.
For some of us it’s not the science, but the stink of corruption and the obvious lies that have raised our hackles.
TIM from NZ says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:27 pm
“Without industrialising…Africa is screwed. Why does no one care about that? Did Bono ruin it for everyone? ”
I read your comment and wondered where you were going with it. I guess Bono (?) doesn’t like wind power and you think it would help industrialize Africa. (No, that is not what I thought but this is a posting about subsidizes for wind power in the USA.) I think I understand your concern, though. The fellow that has argued most persuasively in this arena is Bjørn Lomborg:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg
Comments on his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, are easy to find. Also, WUWT had a post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/30/disputing-the-skeptical-environmentalist/
154 comments on the link above.
“”””” DirkH says:
February 17, 2012 at 11:04 am
Arnold Ring (@ArnoldRing) says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:40 am
“DirkH I don’t know why else the US spent trillions in the Gulf other than to secure oil supplies. What other strategic interest is in that region?”
This might help you. “””””
Well I looked at your movie clip. Well I looked at part of it. So maybe I missed the part where the grandfather of the present king of Jordan kicked a bunch of radical dissident Arabs that were a thorn in his side, across the Jordan river into Israel. Seems that made them instant Palestinians, since Israel is just a part of the ancient land of Palestine. Well the whole lot of them seemed to be just a bunch or warring nomadic tribes that created havoc wherever they went.
And along comes “Lawrence of Arabia”, another community organiser who talked the Arabs into becoming a bunch of very big warring “tribes”, which they have pretty much been ever since.
The Gaza strip is an insanity; like taking the land from San Diego to the Mexican border between highway five and the coast, and turning it over to the Soviets, or North Koreans.
So there already is a dual state solution that has always been there; West of the Jordan river is Israel, and East of it is Jordan, unless they want to rename it back to Palestine, and recover all of their exiled citizens.
It’s truly amazing how much the Gaza strip has blossomed under Palestinian rule since they kicked the Israelis out of there. Meanwhile, the Arabs in Israel, don’t seem to be having much of a problem; nor do the Christians.
Seems to me there was this United Nations thing that set up rules to stop people going around grabbing other people’s territory.
The Israelis should be complaining that Moses managed to find the only dry hole in the middle east; amazing what they have made of it.
Wasn’t it the USA that conned Mosadeq into nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and then having him have an oops moment so the Shah could come in and turn it all into Aramco.
I don’t know why else the US spent trillions in the Gulf other than to secure oil supplies. What other strategic interest is in that region?</i?
The WWII Soviet Strategic Supply lines ran thru North Africa then up thru the Gulf then North via Iran and Iraq. The British and Soviets jointly overthrew the Shah during WWII as the Shah had wanted to remain 'neutral'. WIthout supply lines thru Western Europe(which were blocked by the Germans) the Soviet Army was in danger of starving to death.
Denying the Soviet Union access to 'warm water ports' was a simple way to keep them in check. Without warm water ports they would just starve to death in the Russia winter. If you control someones access to food…you control them.
Roger Knights said, “WUWT should set up a FAQ, with the assistance of volunteers, consisting of answers, culled from past threads, to 101 queries, such as ‘What’s wrong with wind power?’, etc.”
HEAR, HEAR!!!!!
@Bernie; ‘I assume you recognize just how pro-environment many if not most skeptics are.’
Yes I do. I assume that most thinking people (from either side) want a clean environment. It baffles me that people would even accuse someone of being ‘anti-environment’. I guess it becomes a deluded moral high ground from which to argue.
I recently blew my top at a woman who listed all the things she was doing to ‘reduce her carbon footprint’ as though she were Jesus reincarnate. The self righteousness alone set me off.
No thought was given for those, even within her own community, who couldn’t afford to take such ‘liberties’. To her the idea of cutting back on the water for her manicured lawn was equal to cutting back on the water for the use of cooking and cleaning.
It makes me sick with anger when the self indulgent guilt of the middle-class can be used to essentially punish the poorest and sickest.
The problem is…I find it increasingly difficult to remain impartial to the discussion knowing that those who ‘support’ it tend to lean in the opposite direction to me (whether out of ignorance or obstinance).
I think what is needed for these companies to succeed on their own is an energy storage device capable of accumulating energy over a long period of time, storing and releasing it with little loss. I chuckle when I think of this being defined as a missing component back in the 70’s by sci fi author Robert Heinlein. Anyone else remember the Shipstone Corporation?
At 2:49 PM on 17 February, Rujholla had contributed:
Ah, someone else literate in what Heinlein had called “speculative fiction” (see his 1947 essay on the writing thereof).
Has anybody yet considered that if surveys were conducted among both us AGW skeptics and the credulous and/or schemingly duplicitous warmistas as to such literacy in science fiction, we’d find that a preponderance of those critical of the crippled conjecture upon which the hideous “man-made global climate change” fraud is based will reliably prove to be SF readers, while the screeching catastrophists will overwhelmingly demonstrate that they’re a buncha friggin’ mundanes?
Paulino says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:10 am
No, Paulino–and please quit putting words in my mouth. Your “And according to you, ….yada yada yada” is what you’d LIKE me to say; it isn’t what I said at all.
But thanks for the link.
I find it interesting that the authors of the above article thank Amy Larking of Greenpeace, along with James Hansen, Mark Jacobson, Jonathan Levy, John Evans, and Joel Schwartz, yet under their Conflicts of Interest section state “The authors declare no conflicts of interest”.
You may believe what you may believe, but what I didn’t see in the study was what the power source would be used to replace coal, except “cleanly powered smart grids”. Just what are “cleanly powered smart grids” powered by? Here are the alternatives if you eliminate coal:
Solar
Nuclear
Wind
Geothermal
Natural Gas/Petroleum.
Hydro
Exotic
Solar would require an area the size of the state of Nevada or larger–a “dead upon arrival” solution (we wouldn’t be seeing multiple Solyndras bite the dust if this were a viable option already–sans the huge tax monies wasted/purloined).
Nuclear finally got two new plants approved after 33 years! They won’t be on line for 4 more years (a 37 year gap since the last ones). No solution here.
Wind is, in my estimation, never going to be sufficent because it is not “base load” (not reliable). It requires huge subsidies to compete at current rates.
Geothermal has many environmental problems, but may be able to increase somewhat although will probably never be a major source of future energy.
Natural Gas/Petroleum: Probably the only bright spot on the horizon although the current administration is not thrilled about the prospects of putting more CO2 in the atmosphere. The current administration is not carbon-fuel friendly at all unless it benefits them directly (Gulf of Mexico moratorium).
Hydro: Most potential sites are already taken, with a small amount of upside available, and that’s about it.
Exotic perhaps has the most potential and should be receiving significant attention, although there’s no government money going into any significant research on the one I favor most because it upsets the current energy paradigm: http://coldfusionnow.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/29-5-billion-requested-by-doe-0-for-cold-fusion/
So using your analogy of the horse and buggy days, I don’t see any solutions besides coal for meeting our projected energy demands (increasing at 2.7% per year)–we’re heading in reverse if we can’t rely on coal (“Whoa, Nellie!”). Are there problems with coal? Sure there are. But tossing it out completely in favor of wind/solar (or whatever they’re asserting is powering “cleanly powered smart grids” in your referenced article) is irresponsible. The one solution I believe will actually do the job is receiving zero funding; in fact, the powers that be have been and are continuing to fight it with all their might (even though NASA recently applied for a patent on the concept, which I find rather strange and ironic, indeed).
Now, where’d I put my buggy whip?
“Roger Knights said, […]‘What’s wrong with wind power?’[…]”
The irony of wind power is that it wouldn’t exist without petrochemical toxins, not even suitable for boat building according to enviro-nutts, and being completely tax supported to boot.