Sunday, August 29, 2010

Your Money Up in Smoke? Nope. Wind.

There are plenty of things a Republican House can do about Gummint spending.

Beginning here:

...the wind industry is pocketing subsidies that dwarf those garnered by the oil and gas sector. The federal government provides a production tax credit of $0.022 for each kilowatt-hour of electricity produced by wind. That amounts to $6.44 per million BTU of energy produced. [As a point of comparison, the wellhead price of natural gas is currently in the neighborhood of $4.00 per million BTU. - ed.] In 2008, however, the EIA reported subsidies to oil and gas totaled $1.9 billion per year, or about $0.03 per million BTU of energy produced. Wind subsidies are more than 200 times as great as those given to oil and gas on the basis of per-unit-of-energy produced. --WSJ via RedState

Remember that wind-power simply doesn't provide anything NEAR the "rated" output because (surprise, surprise), the wind does not always blow.

Unlike the leeches who suck up the subsidies.

They ALWAYS blow. Or suck, depending on your point of view.

RedState goes on to highlight the lobbying expenditures of wind-blowers, which are quite impressive.

4 comments:

neomom said...

Wind is - at best - only 1/3 as efficient as baseload-capable sources of energy like natural gas, coal, and nuclear.

It would take ~4000 wind turbines to be able to shut down just one typical baseload plant.

That's a lot of land mass and steel. And the turbines can be, and are, built anywhere on the globe (had to add that for those that fantasize about all those green jobs that would be created)

J. Strupp said...

Fine dadster. I can live with that. But can these same politicans live with reducing the over $79 billion in tax rebates/subsidies to producers of fossil fuels (which is double the total sudsidies spent on all renewable energy sources combined)?

Of course not. Because the oil/gas/etc. lobby dwarfs the wind blower's lobby. And they have deeper pockets......


http://www.eli.org/pdf/Energy_Subsidies_Black_Not_Green.pdf

Dad29 said...

Uh huh.

Oil/Gas fuels 100% of the country.

Wind/Solar is what....1%, "but growing!!!"?

J. Strupp said...

So that should mean that the oil industry doesn't require big subsidies right? You know, because the oil/gas fuels 100% country?