Shocker: “Stimulus” Spending Subsidizing Supply Of Green Energy There Is No Demand For

• February 5, 2010

It’s almost like government spending doesn’t actually stimulate the economy or something.
And by the way, this is a point I’ve been making for a while now. Specifically in connection with the $7 million in pork a Phoenix-based business got to build a turbine plant in Bismarck, ND.

WASHINGTON — Despite the Obama administration’s efforts to create jobs making wind turbines in America, some companies say that sluggish demand for wind energy is holding them back.
The U.S. installed more wind power last year — 9,900 megawatts, or enough to power 2.4 million homes — than in any other year.
The growth in wind farm installations in the U.S. was a product of federal stimulus spending. Nonetheless, wind equipment manufacturers cut as many as 2,000 jobs last year. According to the American Wind Energy Association , a trade group, the drop in U.S. jobs is due, in part, to the lack of a long-term national policy that would require a certain percentage of American electricity to come from renewable sources.

What’s sad is that the politicians are no doubt looking at this problem, which stems from a lack of demand for wind energy (thanks to high prices even with subsidies), as something to be solved with…more subsidies.
Meaning we’d be subsidizing demand for a product, wind energy, the supply of which we also subsidized into existence.
Maybe, just maybe, the government shouldn’t be trying to steer energy markets.

Tags: Asshats, Domestic Issues, North Dakota News, Politics

http://Array robert108

“Smart economists know that markets rarely lead to correct prices…”

Correct by what standards? Obama also won a Nobel Prize, so that doesn’t really mean anything.

Thanks for sharing your NeoLuddite/NeoMalthusian theories with us, AV, but no sale.
robert108

“When Opec coughs we get squeezed.”

The direct result of Carter’s handing Iran over to the radical mullahs and handing over our energy policy to his watermelon enviro buddies. We have had an enemy instead of an ally in the ME, and domestic energy obstruction that has cost us trillions in lost income and tens of millions of lost jobs.
Since we keep finding more and more oil, your spew about it being a “finite resource” must be regarded as BS.
http://www.bikebubba.blogspot.com/ bikebubba

AV, if free markets cannot resolve dislocations like the end of the use of a finite resource, then how the heck did we ever overcome the lack of easily available whale oil 150 years ago? What about the lack of bird plumage for womens’ hats? What about the lack of passenger pigeons to feed hungry cowboys? What about the lack of fodder for inner city horse carriages?

I’m sorry, but you’ve got your economics exactly wrong. All those “smart” Keynesian models have failed to do what anyone schooled in Bastiat and Von Mises would have predicted easily; that taking money from the private sector and delivering it to government has actually made us poorer and put people out of work. You don’t need sophisticated mathematical models to figure out the incentives one is setting up are perverse.

Or, put another way, if the Keynesians are so **** smart, tell me why every new unemployment report brings “unexpected” results. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because THEY DON’T WORK.

Just like government controlled markets.

Again, when windmills become competitive with fossil fuels, there will be plenty available to make them, as the price of petroleum will rise to the point where it’s more efficient to use it to make windmill blades than to fuel my truck.

You’re arguing as if markets are complex. Not so. I’ve got something, someone else wants something, we come to an agreement on price. If it’s worth it to sell, I do, otherwise, I don’t. Not that complicated, and it’s worked (where government doesn’t get in the way) for 6000 years.

On the other hand, if hundreds of years of proven oil (coal, natural gas) reserves are insufficient to create an oil-less society, then methinks you’ve got to go back to the drawing board anyways, as burning the entire stock of fossil fuels to create the Sierra Club’s dream environmental world doesn’t sound exactly ecologically responsible to me. It sounds more like bringing 1960s era Pittsburgh and Gary to the Sierra Nevada.
sayanything-203

According to the EIA (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0811a.html) as of 2007, less than 6% of the nation’s summer peak electricity power was generate by oil.

Furthermore, in the past year alone discoveries off the coast of Brazil, the Falkland Islands, Nigeria, and Russia amount to several dozen billion barrels of recoverable crude oil.

The price of crude will continue to go up. We could easily be paying $3.50 or more per gallon of gas by election 2012. But the world is not running low on oil. Nor is it likely to.
robert108

“The last really big oil-field discovery was in the 70s.”

Deceptively misleading, AV. Offshore finds are multiplying, and not just in the US. Check out the discoveries offshore from Brazil. Since the Carter scareology, we have discovered more reserves than were known at that time. “Peak oil” is another leftie hoax.

Please explain the reasoning behind your assertion that oil is “too cheap”.
sayanything-43

Stupid is as stupid does.
robert108

Wrong again! The majority of the imported oil we use comes from Canada, who are not “people who want to kill us”, and the third supplier on the list is Mexico, whose occupants all want to move here. Furthermore, we have abundant oil reserves here in the US, but you leftie obstructionists have been thwarting domestic energy development since Carter. So, your claim of being “held hostage by foreign powers” is equally bogus.
A mutually-beneficial business transaction is not the same as being “held hostage”, btw.
robert108

Just another example of why central planning doesn’t work. In a free market, none of that money would have been wasted; furthermore, it would have gone to creating jobs and profits.
sayanything-4204

So it sounds like the USA should be building every Nuc Elec plant, Coal Elec. and every Coal gasification plant they can as part of the stimulus to take the forthcoming pressure off of Oil needs……….
There are certain industries such as Ag, heavy trucking, Rail, Airline, Military that cannot operate without Oil based fuel & chems

FA Hayek, the early 1900′s economist who fought Keyenism every step of the way, stated if we let Liberals become the dominant force………….hundreds of millions will die of starvation: is proving very true: give them unfettered control of Global Warming, energy exploration & production, constraints on Ag……….

Modern day liberals will do with govt policy what Stalin Lenin, Mao, Che’, Hitler, and other other their direct lineage did with bullets

……but the modern day Liberals will have plausible deniability…..like teenage adolesants, nothing is ever their fault……
sayanything-342

yawn… AV.

No one uses oil for generating electricity.

Wind power is too expensive compared to coal or natural gas. It’s also only about 18% efficient.

We should of spent the stimulus building nuclear power plants.
sayanything-5371

So yes, conservatives are too myopic.

veg, this is an absurd generality.

But this one isn’t: Scratch a Green, Find a Red. The environmental movement is marxism. It’s all about re-distribution of wealth a primacy of the state over the individual.
robert108

As usual for a Marxist, AV, you have it backwards. Oil is what it should cost, since that is what all the market forces result in. The so-called “green technology” is too expensive, since it is very inefficient at delivering usable energy. Should oil become more expensive over time, technology and the markets will adjust appropriately, as always. There is no such thing as “renewable energy”, btw. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed; it just changes form from matter and back again, in a neverending cycle.
Oil, natural gas and coal are concentrated solar energy, stored for our eventual use.
It’s never too late to do research, in a free enterprise economic system.
Central planning always fails, since it is unable to respond quickly and flexibly enough to meet changing demand, so you totalitarians require absolute power to mandate your outcomes. They still don’t work, of course. Eventually, you run out of things to plunder.
j.l.

“Conservatives are too myopic.” This coming from the people who don`t want to drill in our own country where we know there is more oil. ok. “But once oil is too expensive…” And the best way to keep oil prices down is to….. find more oil. See the above.
sayanything-342

AV those industrial size “Peak Generators” as we call them in the industry are run on natural gas unless you are talking about a basic little home generator that is kept in the garage incase of a storm. Don’t try and BS me you clown. I work for an electric company.
robert108

“Robert180, the justification for markets is that they lead to efficiency.”

Your initial premise is wrong, AV. The free market is the natural behavior of free human beings; we do it without any govt mandates; in fact, govt mandates and rigging simply decrease the effectiveness of markets.
Every command economy needs a demand economy underlying it to fund it’s excesses.
What Stiglitz said, or what you say he said, is untrue, Nobel Prize or no.
When President Bush announced the end of the Presidential drilling ban last summer, oil was at $147/barrel, and right after the announcement, it started to drop, finally ending up at $33/barrel, solely due to market forces in a market no longer controlled by enviro policies, but subject to free market forces(many competitors).
That alone is a direct refutation of your claim.
The Swedes weren’t “crazy”, they were just pandering, like socialists always do.

Again, how is the “correct” price determined, in your belief system?
sayanything-256

Oil is too cheap, reducing incentives to move to renewable energy tech.

But once oil is too expensive it will be too late to research, develop, and install renewable energy generation (since this requires a lot of energy).

Again, conservatives are too myopic. Occasionally problems need to be thought about more than one quarter in advance.
sayanything-256

“Again, how is the “correct” price determined, in your belief system?” — robert180

Turns out to be a tricky problem doesn’t it? Markets can’t do it, central planning can’t do it.
sayanything-256

Polyester, vinyl-ester, and epoxy resins are still plastic (thermoset plastics).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic

And GRP does seem to be the most popular wind turbine material, carbon fiber is about 10 times as expensive. With aircraft, stiffness-to-weight ratio is the major factor. Not necessarily so with wind turbines as one can often increase the wall thickness.

“And to help out AV; when the cost of using oil for fuel exceeds its cost for using it in windmills, there will be plenty of material to make as many turbine blades as the world needs. It’s called “econ 101″” — bikebubba
I assure you that such faith in markets is unwarranted. If we estimate out the total energy required to re-tool for a non-oil future, and the total energy in known oil deposits, then it is a lot closer than you market-fundies seem to realize.

That is why smart people advocate govt subsidies now. Why hope that markets will magically provide? Seems very childish and myopic to me.
sayanything-256

Plenty of papers have been published arguing that we may have already past the point where re-tooling for a non-oil future will have minimum impact. The more alarmist of these predicts that our species has overshot the sustainable number of people that the planet can support, using renewable energy alone. If true then the come-down will be a bummer.

“But the market should decide.” — Rob
That’s a faith-based argument. I’m too skeptical for faith, I prefer evidence. What if markets are wrong? Smart economists know that markets rarely lead to correct prices (due to coercion, externalities, and information asymmetry). Stiglitz won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating this.
bikebubba

For reference, wind turbine blades are generally made from aluminium or carbon fiber held together by epoxies, not plastic and glass fiber. Fiberglass is simply not strong enough to stand up to the beating taken by the big windmills, so more or less the same techniques are used for high performance aircraft are used for them.

Which explains, of course, a lot of the expense. Expense which, by the way, correlates to energy use, so it’s really not at all clear that windmills reduce pollution at all.

And to help out AV; when the cost of using oil for fuel exceeds its cost for using it in windmills, there will be plenty of material to make as many turbine blades as the world needs. It’s called “econ 101″
sayanything-3444

On a related note, it was pointed out the other day that during the SOTU Obama made mention of easing restrictions for oil exploration and production domestically. What he failed to mention is that his Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, has determined that oil companies can’t even begin exploring without first producing an environmental impact study. Some eco-freaks have said that the methods used for deep sea exploration “scare the whales”. Liberal idiocy once again trumps common sense.

The answer to this problem is to use what is economically feasible and available today, while continuing to develop alternatives for tomorrow. If wind power, geo-thermal, solar or gerbil power or any of the other “non-impacting” technologies can be made economically viable and reliable, they will take their rightful place in the market. In the meantime we need to use the proven and readily available sources we have to neutralize or eliminate our dependence on imported oil. Drill, mine, build nuclear plants, and do it all right here, right now.
sayanything-2804

Mr. Vegtable, what do you propose to replace plastic with.

Watch the myopic dimstem totally take a pass on this in favor of a sever case of myopia.

Can you say hypocrite? i new you could.
sayanything-256

sbark, you are not concerned at all that FA Hayek, Mises, and the Austrian School of Economics don’t have a lot of mathematical models, little empirical evidence, and that their economic arguments are essentially hand-waving?

Real economists consider them a joke for obvious reasons.
sayanything-256

“But the world is not running low on oil. Nor is it likely to.” — Bat One
Consumption trend for oil is increasing but new oil finds are smaller oil-fields and more difficult to access. The last really big oil-field discovery was in the 70s.

So what’s your logic Bat One, why will oil reserves not run low? We’re obviously using it faster than it is getting made, actually even faster than we’re discovering new oil-fields. And demand is increasing.

The only way you could be right is if fusion reactors become viable in the next few decades.
sayanything-7134

But instead of having some foresight we should still depend on a product supplied by people that want to kill us. I thought that one of the reasons we wanted to develop alternate fuel is for security purposes. Apparently you believe we should continue to be held hostage by foreign powers.
sayanything-2804

Well AV, as you prove every time you open your cock holster, Bullshyte is both cheap and renewable. Maybe you can bestir your lazy parasitic arse long enough to go to India and import the technology for converting it to power for everyday use.
sayanything-7134

we are still dealing with a finite resource. When Opec coughs we get squeezed. Please some forward thinking.
sayanything-256

The ones near where I used to live were gas turbines that ran on diesel. And Bat One provided a link showing that up to 6% seems to come from petroleum, so I’m probably not imagining things.
sayanything-256

Robert180, the justification for markets is that they lead to efficiency. (And yes, they do have many advantages over pure command economies, but this is irrelevant since few advocate these.) Price is the information for markets to allocate resources efficiently. If prices are far from where they should be (due to externalities, coercion, or information asymmetry) then markets cannot allocate resources efficiently.

Stiglitz and others won the Nobel Economics Prize for showing that markets are inefficient in all but exceptional situations. How big is this disparity? Dunno, depends on a lot of factors and the particular commodity? When small, no probs, when big — like it possibly is for oil — then markets fail.

P.S. Yes, Obama’s Nobel Prize was a joke, clearly those Swedes were crazy.
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

This may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen you right:

But once oil is too expensive it will be too late to research, develop, and install renewable energy generation (since this requires a lot of energy).

We’re not going to run out of oil in one day. Supplies will gradually cease to keep up with demand. At which point prices will go up, and alternatives (like wind or whatever) will become viable.

But the market should decide. Not you. That’s called “freedom” and “liberty.” The antithesis of what you stand for which is control.
sayanything-256

“No one uses oil for generating electricity.” — Mickey
Well, for starters, they do. Most commonly for temporary generation, filling in while larger generators come on-line.

Secondly, you ever heard of plastic? Oil product apparently. Wind turbine blades are made from glass reinforced plastic. But more generally, oil and its products are used in countless industrial processes. Re-tooling for a future without oil ironically takes a lot of oil.

So yes, conservatives are too myopic.

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Shocker: “Stimulus” Spending Subsidizing Supply Of Green Energy There Is No Demand For

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