The debate surrounding the Production Tax Credit (PTC) intensified last quarter following several high-profile attempts by Congress to extend the credit before it expires this year.
Industry warnings of precipitous declines in clean-tech investment and imminent job losses have reached a fevered pitch. The New York Times, for example, reflexively accused budget-hawks in Congress of being preoccupied with safeguarding the dominance of the oil and gas industries.
The idea that wind, which represents less than 3% of total electricity generation in the country after huge taxpayer benefits and state mandates, could threaten the larger power market is fantasy. It demonstrates a general ignorance about wind energy’s purpose and its limited contribution to our energy portfolio.
While we might forgive a newspaper editor’s misunderstanding of the complexities of renewable energy policy, it’s quite another thing to see the same level of ignorance on display on Capitol Hill by the very people tasked with understanding and voting on these policies.
In New Zealand the wind farm zealots will stop at nothing. Check out
http://nzwindfarms.wordpress.com/
One thing for sure, creating reliable economic industrial quantities of energy is the last thing that wind energy can do. Neither can it create genuinely productive jobs. Ditto for any other form of so called alternative energy. There is no there there.
There are jobs that can be pointed to but at what cost and at what lost opportunity? It is all a net loss with costs wildly exceeding benefits. That is if the goal is a prosperous productive economy run by a free people each doing what they do best and freely trading their products.. If the goal is to reduce the economy to the poverty level and below, all you have to do is for the government to keep doing what it has been doing.
A top down command and control economy will collapse upon itself once it has consumed all the wealth it had managed to produce in its once freer past or has stolen from its freer neighbors. We are well on our way to achieving that questionable goal for the entire planet.
See No They Can’t for instructive detail.
A PTC is nothing more than a taxpayer subsidy to an industry that can’t make it without the subsidy. Only thing is it comes on the backside.
It looks like the British public are finally coming round to reaching their limit with Royal Society psychopathic delusions and Prince Charles’s hallucinations.
But at what cost to the British? How long is it going to take them to recover?