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
RE: Allan MacRae: If we ever develop a “super-battery”
The “Super battery” like fusion is a fanciful illusion. Batteries have been around for 150 years. Plot watts per pound and watts per dollar, and you will discover that the rate of technical progress is very slow. Because of huge demand for mobile devices (not including autos), the rate of progress has moved up recently. But extrapolation of the plot shows it will be many decades before an electric car has the range and price point of a gas vehicle. Another show stopper is the many hours needed to recharge a vehicle. A much better bet is super capacitors which can be recharged in minutes, but this is still an infant technology. Super capacitors will have shortcomings too.
The same can be said for fusion. When I was in school we were told that fusion would be viable within 50 years. 50 years later it is probably another 50 years before commercial viability. Maybe LENR will turn out to be real. I won’t bet on it.
Yeah, I think it’s really ignorant, build a hundred plus reactors without knowledge of even being able to effectively fuel them.
We get an ethical and sensible candidate to lead the US who supports corporations, but not corporate welfare, and he gets lied about so he can thus be ignored. Andrew Napalitano referenced him to being the Thomas Jefferson of our time. He was soon shown the door.
“Judge Napolitano. How to get fired from FOX in under 5 mins”
“With hundred(s) of planned nuclear reactors worldwide, some under construction, there might not be enough uranium mined to support them.”
There’s lots of uranium remaining in the ground don’t kid yourself. Deposits are just sitting there waiting for sufficient demand to justify mining them. And old used nuclear rods have the potential to be recycled and used again. Wouldn’t be too concerned about having enough uranium.
right then.sounds like ye all don’t understand the waking reality you are in. well not all, just the primates with the red necks, you know who you are! Soon you’ll loose access to your foreign oil supplies. You’re dollars won’t be worth much then will they? Silly monkeys! You could have spent your fantasy greenbacks on some basic power infrastructure and kept the lights on, thats the main purpose of electricity. Of Course you could always nuke those cheeky countries who decide its pointless to keep you alive any more, you just use stuff up like mad, take their oil anyway and live greedily ever after. ‘declining energy supply’ is just leftist bullshit, or something. We just need to think positive have faith, all that zzzzz
So much for altruism and deep caring for the environment….
The #1 reason for the United States’ economic problems right now is liberalism, which has been dramatically pushed forward by every president since Hoover with the partial exceptions of Eisenhower and Reagan.
Also by every Congress since at least FDR, with the exception of some of the Senates in the pre-U.N. days.
Fix the addiction to unrestrained liberalism at the federal level (which addiction is what leads the U.S. to adopt anti-U.S. policies) and the economic and energy problems just about handle themselves.
Liberalism produces the obsession with debt (both private and government debt) as a tool for one’s improvement.
Obsession with debt has led to the delusional beliefs that:
– An asset is a liability.
-A liability is an asset.
– Production doesn’t matter.
– Productivity doesn’t matter.
– Deficits don’t matter.
and finally, by extension, the ultimate in economic delusions:
– Results, in general, don’t matter.
All of this is the antithesis of conservatism. All of this represents steps on the path to collapse.
And none of it has any direct relation with engineering, available energy reserves per capita, or foreign policy. All three of these things are, from a technical standpoint, subordinate to the issue I have referenced. That issue — liberalism as a state ideology — has been set as the given, the constant, the “immutable”, the “unquestionable”, and those other three are made variable but dependent on the needs that arise from the acceptance of the first.
Conclusion: Talk of getting control of your energy or your engineering or your deficits is interesting. But first things first: you have to get control of your state, so that what has been made constant can once again be made variable, and thereby, the conditions that had been undesirably variable can be brought back within an acceptable range.
RTF
Taking one of the nicer drives of my life in May 2010, I was traveling the back roads from the Fox River valley, northwest of Chicago, heading toward Iowa, along the Illinois-Wisconsin sate line, as much as I could that line. It is one of the few areas of northern IL where there are hills. There are some wonderful vistas (by Illinois standards, anyway), both to the north and to the south – kind of like one stretch of the crest in the Blue Ridge Parkway near Mt. Mitchell, NE of Asheville, though with less trees and more farms. As I climbed up a hill somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I saw UP, in between the beautiful trees, a monstrous white behemoth, slowly flashing an arm between the branches – WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP. And I hung my head in sadness.
Since then, more and more, as I drive down through Illinois I cry, when I see the rape of the prairie, in fields of 100 or more of those big, frightening, horrendously ugly monstrosities. Yes, frightening. They scare me. They are like huge versions of those bobbing desk top toys from the 1970s, looking from the side as if they are bobbing up and down. They are like oil well pumps – only 50 times bigger. They make me think of the Martians in War of the Worlds. WHY any farmer would want those gigantic pieces of alien crap all around them – money be damned – I have no idea. Alien to rural America, I can assure you.
I HATE the things, on esthetic grounds alone.
The sooner they are gone, the better. Literally, as I do drive in the flat featureless plains of central Illinois (particularly around Emington, where I used to live), I have asked myself, “Is THIS going to be what the state is going to look like forever, now? Please no!” It has little to recommend it, those horizons that are at eye level in all directions (like the steppes), but THIS is about the only thing that could make those horizons less appealing. Armies of giants? We want armies of giants in our state? Would we like it less or more if they were all giant gantries for loading ships – and in all directions? How TERRIBLE of a rural environment is that?
So, the sooner the gargantuan puppets die, the sooner I, for one, will believe the world can come back down from Brobdingnagian scale, back down to human scale.
Kill them all. Win the war for humans.
Steve Garcia
Robin Edwards says:
February 17, 2012 at 3:22 am
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.
————————–
Well Robin, actually they were being honest for once. In a one year time frame three million homes would, at some point in the year, recieve some power from wind to their home.
DG says:
February 18, 2012 at 11:10 am
right then.sounds like ye all don’t understand the waking reality you are in. well not all, just the primates with the red necks, you know who you are! Soon you’ll loose access to your foreign oil supplies.
=============================
DG, look up prejudice and ignorance, then face the mirror. The energy crisis is manufactured politicaly. The WORLD has adequet energy, fossile fuel and otherwise, for many many thousands of years.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
====================================
The perfect headline for the article, “Congress Breaks Wind; Wind Industry Faints”
Klem, I wish I had a warehouse of uranium. Investing in scarcities has been profitable, but I will keep what you say in mind and research it more. Here they talk about the numbers on uranium demand. Have found them other places also.
http://web.streetauthority.com/m/srw/SRW05/srw-sample.asp?TC=SRW692&utm_source=NL-TOW&utm_medium=EMAIL&U=1867854&utm_campaign=TOW_This_Rare_Precious_Metal__Could_Easily_G
Sabastian says: February 18, 2012 at 7:14 am
RE: Allan MacRae: If we ever develop a “super-battery”
The “Super battery” like fusion is a fanciful illusion. Batteries have been around for 150 years. Plot watts per pound and watts per dollar, and you will discover that the rate of technical progress is very slow. Because of huge demand for mobile devices (not including autos), the rate of progress has moved up recently. But extrapolation of the plot shows it will be many decades before an electric car has the range and price point of a gas vehicle.
___________
Sebastian, your comment seems inappropriate in tone and context, as if I were a big fan of wind power (I’m not) and had great hopes for a “super-battery” (I don’t).
Furthermore, you say: “But extrapolation of the plot shows it will be many decades before an electric car has the range and price point of a gas vehicle.”
Electric cars are now appearing in the marketplace, and they may succeed or fail, but there is no need for them to have the same range as a gas vehicle – most people seldom use the full range of their gasoline vehicles, instead using their cars almost exclusively for short daily commutes to and from work.
The key to using all these electric cars in a ‘super-battery” is that this application is essentially free (secondary use of the resource), which means that your economic argument about the high cost of batteries does not have much traction.
I still see great practical obstacles for the “super-battery” concept, and I use the term broadly, to include batteries, capacitors, recycled hydroelectric power, or whatever, and I doubt that a super-battery will become a practical reality in the next twenty years.
In conclusion:
Wind power is still an energy dog. I wrote this conclusion, with confidence, in newspaper articles in 2002 and 2003. A decade later, this energy dog still has fleas. Even if we overcome the fatal flaws of wind power’s highly intermittent power generation profile through the use of a “super-battery”, there is still the serious problem of bird and bat kill.
Grid-connected wind power is uneconomic and anti-environmental.
Let me repeat yet again, for those who missed it:
“Wind power – it doesn’t just blow – it sucks!”
After the people who asserted that coal would be uneconomic if not subsidifzed failed to produce any number or links, I accidentally found this article which might be the source for their assertions:
http://grist.org/coal/2011-09-30-coal-is-enemy-of-human-race-mainstream-economics-edition/
Quite an interesting article. Unfortunately, it doesn’t ask the question how our civilization can exist in the first place when its primary power source destroys wealth instead of creating it. Had the author asked himself that, well, he probably wouldn’t work for grist.
In this “feel-good” world that bellies-up to beliefs and eschews engineering reality, the concept of Energy Returned On Energy Invested must be rejected or at least appear hostile.
The abandonment of tax credits and the total collapse of this sham, leaf-raking, unsustainable, alternative energy industry can not come soon enough.
Who would burn more than three barrels of oil to find one barrel? This is the legacy of wind power.
DirkH,
That conclusion sounds counterintuitive.
A Harvard study of the negative externalities of coal is here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x/full
Generating electricity from coal results in people suffering ill health and dying. The owner of the coal generator does not compensate the families for these deaths, instead, he can externalise these costs so that they do not affect his bottom line. This is a subsidy. You can argue about the amount. What is a human life worth etc but this is a different question.
My point is that coal is subsidised.
> ArnoldRing said two things. “My point is that coal is subsidised.”
Give yourself a cookie. From the DOE’s own analysis, coal is subsidised at a rate of $0.44 per MWh. Wind and solar are in the $24.00 per MWh. These subsidies include black lung health benefits, but not the costs of operating OSHA or other safety enforcement agencies.
> and he said: Generating electricity from coal results in people suffering
> ill health and dying. The owner of the coal generator does not compensate
> the families for these deaths, instead, he can externalise these costs so
> that they do not affect his bottom line. This is a subsidy. You can argue
> about the amount. What is a human life worth etc but this is a different
> question.
You progressive utopian occupiers just drive me crazy when you make your one-sided emotional analyses. There are deaths in the renewable energy industry too, probably more than you’re aware of. And the numbers are growing as the number of wind farms increases. This is from a 2010 analysis done by the Heritage Foundation:
“On a million-megawatt-hour basis, the wind-energy industry has averaged 0.0220 deaths compared with 0.0147 for coal over the years 2003-2008. Even adding coal’s share of fatalities in the power-generation industry, which brings the rate up to 0.0164, still leaves wind power with a 34 percent higher mortality rate. For the record, the workplace fatality rate for wind also exceeds that for oil and gas on an equivalent-energy basis.”
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/26/wind-power-is-more-dangerous-than-coal-or-oil/
One might argue with Heritage’s final numbers or their methods, but CLEARLY you will have a large number of offsetting deaths in the “renewable” electricity generating industry, if not even higher fatality figures, if renewables were ever to scale to provide the same quantities of electricity as does coal. Of course, I don’t think it is capable of scaling, so maybe we’re just arguing about nothing.
Would you now like to talk about nuclear energy electrical generation risks?
Re: “and had great hopes for a “super-battery” (I don’t).”
I miss read your comment. I thought you endorsed hunting for a unicorn.
RE: “Wind power – it doesn’t just blow – it sucks!”
We wholeheartedly agree. Isn’t interesting that greens only endorse technologies that are wildly uneconomic (solar) or don’t work (fusion) or won’t scale (hydro and geo-thermal).
A few years ago the Greens said natural gas could be the transition fuel to a green economy. The said it before the effects of horizontal drilling and fracking were know to them. Natural gas is not the transition to the future; it is the future.
Thanks for the clarification Sabastian.
Grid-connected solar power much more expensive that wind power, and suffers similar if somewhat lesser problems of intermittency. Still, I have some hope for solar power in the long term, because of the rapid pace of progress in the electronic industry – we’ll see …
In the interim, for all you uber-subsidized solar power enthusiasts (not you Sabastian), a catchy slogan:
“Solar power – stick it where the Sun don’t shine!”
From:
http://climatephysics.org/2011/06/15/montana-supreme-court-rejects-the-global-warming-petition-by-our-childrens-trust/
CPI used 2 key scientific exhibits in its Motion to Intervene: A 321-page “Climate Depot Special Report” compiled by Marc Morano and The Heartland Institute’s “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” edited by S. Fred Singer.
Maybe that explains the recent “attack” on Heartland.
Thanks to NorfolkAlan above for the heads up.
@Espen said:
February 17, 2012 at 2:55 am
“AFAIK it went much better than expected in Germany – in fact, and somewhat surprisingly, France, with all its nuclear plants, was buying electric power from Germany. Apparently, Germany had very sunny weather during the cold (and partly also windy weather), so solar power (and partly wind) was a significant contributor.”
Espen, you should check your facts before posting. In actual fact, though Germany has in fact been exporting electricity to France, it is not electricity from renewables, it is electricity from coal fired generators and even an old oil-fired generator. The Germans have had to start up these coal and oil fired generators not because renewables don’t produce electricity, but because of their they produce it unpredictably and unreliably and thus require constant back up from reliable generation such coal, gas and nuclear.
The greater the percentage of renewables on a grid the less reliable the grid and incidentally the higher the co2 emissions, both total and /kWh – if anyone really thinks that CO2 is a problem they should consider this fact.
“Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,809439,00.html
http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Germany_forced_to_tap_into_electricity_reserves_999.html
Germany has been exporting not only to France, but also to any country they can pay to take the excess power they are producing when their renewables do generate. The difference, given the present cold weather, is that other countries can actually use the electricity at present given the huge demand for electric heating. But earlier this year that wasn’t the case when Poland was talking of blocking German exports of electricity
http://www.lsarc.ca/lsarcaa1.htm#Poland_blocks_imports_of_German_wind_and_solar_energy
Just as with AGW we see the promoters of renewables telling half-truths, cherry picking facts, or taking them out of context, in their propaganda as they try to convince us that inordinately expensive, unproductive, unpredictable and unreliable industrial scale renewable technologies must continue to receive subsidies in order to save the planet.
The only thing green about these technologies is the money they transfer from ratepayers and taxpayers into the pockets of investment bankers and corporations.
I would venture to say most of the people that are happy about another 37,000 jobs and that is not counting the truck drivers/shipping company jobs, are the same ignorant people who want EPA to shut down power plants cause they pollute the air, they enjoy the benefits of electricity and complain about the companies that provide it, then complain about high energy bills. Tax credits and govt funding for companies that actually create jobs and improve our way of life is waste but billions to bail out crooked bankers and mortgage companies is OK. The wind turbines are manufactured, shipped, built, and operated by Americans, so you people are rejoicing in thousands of american jobs being terminated in a troubled economy. Congrats!
Succumbing to the broken window fallacy, Mike P vomits up:
To this truly crappy and idiotic misapprehension of the laws of economics (which, like the laws of physics, work even if you don’t want them to) there have been made on this thread many responses already.
The “thousands of american jobs” entangled in the manufacture, installation, and upkeep of these bat-swatting Teletubbies pinwheels don’t produce enough return on the expenditure of materials and effort to become intrinsically viable. This is why government thuggery must be exerted to bring them into existence, and the moment political conditions change so that no such goon-squad extortionate misappropriation of resources takes place, the efforts to create and run such wind turbines come spectacularly to naught, leaving behind the residua of unemployment and thousands of gaunt gaudy nonfunctional structures with less economic value than those big ugly statues all to hellangone over Easter Island.
In Austrian School economics, the wind turbine boondoggle extolled by Mike P is known as a malinvestment, formally defined as:
This formal academic consideration of malinvestment, of course, politely fails to address the consideration of political corruption as it has manifested in the government subsidization of the wind turbine industry, which would never have engaged any genuine economic interest whatsoever absent political chicanery and the arrant stupidity of people like M<ike P and other flaming Watermelons.
So we should all rejoice that jobs and other economic resources idiotically – even criminally – devoted to a purpose that was impracticable from before the first day it was ever considered are now no longer pushing along a path that could achieve nothing but absolutely useless waste.
Too bad all these “supposed jobs” will be lost, but hey, if the business, whether it’s farmers, wind or what have you, it needs to make it on their own w/o gov’t money.