The Down Side of Alternative Energy

[Daveparts still]

The Down Side of Alternative Energy
By David Glenn Cox

On April 15, 1912, the Cunard liner Titanic struck an iceberg and sank. The following month Cunard had a 100 percent improvement in their safety record; they didn’t lose a single vessel! Why, that is an astounding fact, a 100 percent improvement in just thirty days.

April 23 (Bloomberg) -- New home sales increased 27 percent in March from the previous month to an annual pace of 411,000.

September 26, 2009 (LA Times) -- Last year ended with 485,000 new homes sold, the worst year for new-home sales since 1982 and the third-worst year since the federal government began tracking the data in 1963. New-home sales peaked in 2005 at 1.23 million units.

November, December and January were the worst months ever on record for new-home sales. The news media trumpets a 27 percent increase as good news and buries the bad.

CNN -- New-home sales rise fastest in 47 years.

With tax deductions and builder discounts, 2010 is on track to be the worst year on record for new-home sales. Or look at it this way, for every new home sold almost ten existing homes will be foreclosed upon.

It is all about spin and misdirection; watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! When stories of Iraqi torture prisons hit the press, suddenly comes the story of top Al-Queada leaders killed in Iraq. Buried in the text of the story was the loss of a six million-dollar Blackhawk helicopter. How do you surround a house with troops and then fire missiles at it and lose a six million-dollar helicopter? More importantly, in this raid, proclaimed as Iraqi-led, was the death of one more American and the injury of three others. Sorry, fellas, that’s not progress.

I know, I know, alternative energy. I ain’t the kind of fella to lead you on so I’ll get to it.

Ok, sure, wind power is great and it’s safe and it’s clean and terrorists can’t make a bomb out of it. But now from Germany comes shocking new evidence that wind power can actually cause energy problems! It’s true! I wouldn’t lie to you!

Since 2002 the German government has subsidized the builders of wind turbines with tax credits. This has led to an increase in wind power to 7.5 percent of all electricity generated in Germany with over 21,000 wind turbines. Germany leads all of Europe in wind turbines while the rest of the European Union gets 5 percent of its electricity from wind. The US gets 1 percent of its electricity from wind power and 48 percent from good old coal.

All these wind turbines are creating a nightmare for German electrical producers because on windy nights there is just too dang much electricity coming into the substations. Anyone who has ever overcharged a battery knows what that means, too much electricity is just as bad as not enough electricity. So German utilities are asking customers to please leave their lights on when it’s a windy night and paying them to do it. Not only that, all that excess electricity is causing lower prices for consumers.

“We’re seeing that wind energy lowers prices, which is great for the consumers,” Christian Kjaer head of the European Wind Energy Association said at his group’s conference in Warsaw this week. “We as producers have to acknowledge that this means operating the existing plant fewer hours a year, and this has an effect on investors,” and profit.

It has gotten so bad that wind turbine producers have been asked twice this year to turn off many of their wind turbines due to excess electricity. Producers claim that it is the utility companies falling down on the job; that what is needed are new transmission lines to carry the excess electricity away to where it is needed. These wind producers are beginning to haul in the big euros and an envious eye is upon them.

Nord Pool, the Nasdaq OMX Group-owned Scandinavian power bourse, last year took steps to encourage generators to limit production by implementing a minimum price. The most generators would pay users to take their power is 200 euros per megawatt hour when there is excess electricity from too much wind. The measures are meant to “increase the effectiveness of the market forcing power generators to consider reducing their electricity generation or having to pay for delivering electricity.”

You see, these crazy environmentalists and wind power activists just aren’t playing fair!

“Wind’s impact on prices results from its low marginal costs, which pushes more expensive technologies including natural gas and coal out of the market," a Helsinki-based industry consultant said. "Fossil-fuel burning relies on fuel, which can boost the price of electricity from those sources.”

Britain introduced a plan early in the last decade to build ten thousand wind turbines by 2020; so far they produce enough electricity for over 650,000 homes. An American company, Clipper International, will begin manufacturing giant turbine blades over two hundred feet tall. The company hopes that by 2020 it will be manufacturing both blades and advanced gearbox technology in their new factory and hopes to employ 500 full-time workers. The new plant will be located in Walker, England, near the river Tyne.

Clipper chairman, James Dehlsen said, "The offshore wind market in the UK is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting sectors in the global renewable-energy industry." Clipper is being subsidized by the UK government to the tune of almost $7 million, mere peanuts when compared with the Obama administration’s $8.3 billion bet on nuclear power. A bet the Congressional Budget Office says has a 50% chance of failure. The point, however, is that American companies must go overseas to generate green jobs. In Spain energy prices have fallen 26 percent this year on the success of wind and hydroelectric power.

We’ve got something here in America that those European countries don’t have. We’ve got a large coal industry and a large coal lobby in Congress. We also have a strong oil industry and congressional lobby and they don’t want to see natural gas, which accounts for 20 percent of the market, impeded. It is, after all, the most expensive fuel in the world used to generate electricity. We also have a nuclear lobby and they have a friend in the White House who thinks that even though nuclear power is almost as expensive as natural gas, and is much more dangerous, that it is the best way forward in this challenging energy market.

The only downside of alternative energy is that it doesn’t have a powerful congressional lobby. With the recent coal mine disaster in West Virginia and now the hundred mile-wide oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico it only adds emphasis that this country needs to reevaluate its energy policy. A little more than a year ago I suggested a WPA-style works project to build wind turbines across America and I made the point that a government-sponsored program would force coal, natural gas and nuclear into the background if they were forced to compete against clean energy. The effect of wind power in Germany proves that to be true.

Mr. Obama’s $8.3 billion bet on two nuclear reactors could be better spent on almost 9,000 large wind turbines, creating more jobs and more energy for a more sane future. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of potential wind power and already in Texas wind power is cheaper than coal. Electric cars are on their way and the cost of motor fuel will only increase. The German experience shows us that it needn’t be a problem if we legislate with our heads and not with our lobbyists.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Daveparts/344