Environmentalist Bobby Kennedy Calls Out The Wind Power Sham
I’ve often pointed out here on the blog and on my radio show that wind power is a scam. Even with big subsidies, wind power costs consumers several times what power from sources such as coal and natural gas cost. When I bring up this point, especially since North Dakota is fast becoming the “Saudi Arabia” of wind energy with hundreds of turbines popping up all over the countryside, I’m accused of being a curmudgeon unable to how, well, progressive wind energy is.
But you don’t have to take my arch-conservative word for it. No less than a Kennedy, a liberal environmental lawyer, is calling out the wind power sham:
I never thought I’d agree with a member of the Kennedy clan, but Bobby Kennedy’s son got it right when he dismissed the much-hyped Cape Wind project that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved last week. “It’s a boondoggle of the worst kind,” Kennedy said. “It’s going to cost the people of Massachusetts $4 billion over the next 20 years in extra costs.”
If anything, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, underestimated the cost of Cape Wind. The project will see the construction of 130 wind-powered turbines off the coast of Cape Cod Massachusetts that will, according to its developers, generate an average of 170 megawatts of electricity for the Bay State. The turbines will cost about $1 billion to build. Let’s assume that the useful life of the wind turbines is twenty years, that the maintenance costs of the windmills is zero, and that nobody has to pay a dime of interest on the $1 billion worth of financing needed to construct these windmills. Even if we accept such wildly inaccurate and charitable assumptions, the cost of energy generated by Cape Wind over those twenty years will be over thirty-three cents per kilowatt. That’s more than six times the typical wholesale price for electrons today, around six cents per kilowatt, depending on the market.
Thanks to government subsidies, Massachusetts’ residents won’t have to pay the full price for Cape Wind power. Instead, they’ll only have to fork over four and a half times the going rate, rather that something over six times that benchmark.
What’s more, remember that even as taxpayers subsidize wind energy and even as they pay higher rates for wind energy as power consumers they must also pay to have non-wind power capacity available to meet peak demand just in case the wind should sto blowing.
To review, wind power requires subsidies. Even with subsidies, wind power is several times more expensive than traditional energy. And windmills don’t displace existing sources of power, because those existing sources of power are still necessary in case the wind isn’t blowing.
So what’s the point? Well, it does make “green energy” industry types richer.
Tags: electricity, green industry, power, robert kennedy jr, wind energy
