No wonder they don’t understand that “clean energy” makes no economic sense.
This attack on skeptic Roy Spencer in The Guardian states:
I recently documented the example of Kansas, which has rapidly installed wind energy over the past several years. Kansas utilities reported negligible electricity price increases of just 1% to 2% to cover renewable energy investments in 2012 and 2013.
The “example of Kansas” link in the quote takes you to this article in The Guardian which states:
The Department of Energy has concluded that the total economic benefit of adding 1,000 megawatts of wind energy in Kansas would exceed $1bn over a 20-year period, including $2.7m per year in payments to landowners, $2.9m per year in local property tax revenue, thousands of construction jobs, and 432 new local long-term jobs. All evidence indicates that continuing to add wind energy will have little impact on electricity rates and will benefit the local economy.
The “has concluded” link in the quote takes you to this Department of Energy analysis.
While the DOE analysis certainly does indeed estimate that the “cumulative economic benefits” from 1000 megawatts of wind power development in Kansas to be $1.08 billion over 20 years, that estimate is not offset against the costs of building the wind in the first place — $1,650/kilowatt or $1.65 billion/1,000 megawatts, according to the same DOE analysis.
And last time we checked, $1.08 billion was not greater than $1.65 billion.
The DOE analysis is a Bush Administration document, so maybe “fuzzy math” is to blame.
“Why trillions when we can have billions?”