By Alan Caruba
Imagine you wanted to get in your
electric car and drive a considerable distance. It wouldn’t take long for your
car to run out of power, so you would have to have another car, one using
gasoline, to drive behind you to make sure you reached your destination.
That’s a description of “renewable
energy”, wind and solar, in America today because they both require backup from
traditional energy sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. And
“renewable energy” based on “free” sun and wind power costs more to produce and
purchase. Need it be said that the sun does not always shine consistently
everywhere or at night and that the wind does not always
blow?
Within twenty-four hours of one
another I received a news release from the Governor’s Wind Energy Coalition
celebrating the election of a new chairman and vice chairman, and read a CNN
news article saying that “The White House wants to put more returning
servicemen and women to work manufacturing and installing solar panels” as part
of “his growing list of climate actions meant to combat global warming.”
That list was a twelve-page long,
single-spaced White House fact sheet. The White House seems to think that the
states can do something about “climate change”, but the climate is measured in
decades and centuries, not whether it is going to rain next Monday which is
something we call “the weather.” And just as you can do nothing about the rain,
neither can you do anything to affect the climate decades from
now.
The White House has a problem. There
is no “global warming.” Even if you change the name to “climate change”, the
Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle for the last eighteen years.
For the past 5,000 years humans have,
as often as not, “done something” about the climate by moving somewhere else it was less of a bother
and threat or found ways to adapt. Other than prayer, there was and is nothing humans can do about Mother
Nature.
Most surely, getting veterans to
manufacture solar panels is about as lame and stupid an idea as the President
has proposed in the last 24 hours. Does the name “Solyndra” ring a bell? It was
one of several solar farms that, along with wind farms went belly-up, leaving
investors and consumers with nothing but the sunlight and passing
breezes.
Indeed, the best news of late has been
that the U.S. Senate has rejected a proposal to extend the federal
wind Production Tax Credit (PCT) for another five years. The wind producers
have benefitted from it for three decades. The federal subsidy to wind-energy
producers expired along with other tax breaks at the end of 2013, but was
retroactively extended through 2014 as part of the Cromnibus budget bill passed
last December.
The PCT was intended to provide what
was a then-new energy industry a helping hand, but it kept being extended and
the industry benefitted as well from renewable energy mandates (REM) in 29
states and the District of Columbia. They require that a specific amount of
electricity be purchased from renewable energy, wind or solar, producers. All
that managed to do was drive up the cost of electricity to consumers. This is
what happens when politicians get involved.
That’s a good reason to wonder why
there is a Governors Wind Power Coalition in the first place. It consists of 23
Democratic and Republican governors from every region of the nation “working
together to develop the nation’s wind energy resources”, but the nation doesn’t
need wind energy which produces an unpredictable amount as opposed to
traditional resources such as coal.
At the same time the President is
talking about solar and wind power, his administration is pursuing a relentless
“war” on coal that is forcing the primary source of electricity in America,
coal-fired plants, to shut down. If that doesn’t sound like treason, then
consider too that the U.S. is the greatest producer of oil and natural gas in
the world and we have at least two century’s worth of known coal reserves. We
have absolutely no need for wind or solar energy.
When Obama gave his State of the Union
speech in 2014, solar power represented a pathetic 0.2 percent of the U.S.
electricity supply according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
According to the Energy Research Institute, in 2013 wind power provided 1.6% of
all the energy consumed in the U.S.
There isn’t a single good reason for
either wind or solar power in an energy powerhouse like the United States. They
are both costly, unpredictable, and a threat to a number of animal species.
Neither the science, the cost, nor the recent history of “renewable energy”
provides a single good reason to force Americans to pay for this “green”
failure.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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