Overcoming President Obama's Wind Power Addiction Page 2 of 2 - Forbes.com

Overcoming President Obama's Wind Power Addiction
Robert Bradley Jr., 06.07.11, 05:30 PM EDT
Page 2 of 2

Notably, the Department of Energy has aimed at getting wind to contribute 20% of the energy market by 2030. With a total of around 40,000 wind megawatts currently up and running in the US, meeting that mark requires the creation of over 13,000 new megawatts of wind annually--twice the growth rate the industry posted last year, which was a historic high. In the face of record federal budget deficits, wind power, hardly an infant industry, is set for decline.

So why hasn't wind energy taken off despite seemingly limitless government entitlement?
Article Controls

For starters, it's inherently unreliable. No matter where you are in the country, wind cannot produce a steady flow of power. That inconsistency--called intermittency in the trade--produces an inferior product at inflated cost.

The Cape Wind project is itself facing a serious problem of low demand due to high prices. The starting rate for its power is set at 18.7 cents per kilowatt--that's almost double the average U.S. cost of electricity according to the Energy Information Administration. As a result, one of the two major Massachusetts utilities, NSTAR, has decide not to buy from Cape Wind and is buying renewable energy elsewhere.

Industrial wind parks are also generally located in wide open, rural areas far from major population centers. Or they're offshore, located far away from just about everything. Delivering such electricity to towns and cities requires special transmission facilities sized for wind's peak load, leaving the system poorly utilized. Such extra transmission expense drives up the delivered cost of wind vs. facilities that are closer to market.

But what about the environment? Surely even a highly inefficient energy source can be worth supporting if it makes a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

Solar competes with traditional energy sources where prices are on the high end. Wind is too expensive and the one thing it should have going for it is the price should remain close to it's starti

There is zero independent scientific evidence that wind energy can make a consequential reduction in CO2 levels. Wind's intermittency requires that fossil-fuel-fired generation fill the valleys to make sure wind can keep the lights on. So the net CO2 savings for the average wind facility is actually quite low. And that leaves wind's negative environmental impacts that have caused growing grassroots opposition.

Despite decades of effort, wind energy still hasn't proved to be a significant or efficient means of America energy production. Showering the industry with even more laurels and tax dollars isn't going to change the situation. Yet that's exactly what the president is proposing.

Enough. Time to get government out of energy markets and fully unleash the competitive forces that have worked wonders everywhere else in the economy. Let wind play its natural role in the American energy sector: very marginal at best.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. is the CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research and author of six books on energy history and public policy.