Romney Gets a Wind Power Tax Credit Smackdown from Starbucks, Yahoo!, & Others

” and they work at about 8% efficiency in Western Maine ”

Proof please.

Ah. WIND power is what doesn’t create a West-Texas WIND-energy boom. WIND is what doesn’t work when 100% of electricity on the Danish island of Samsø comes from WINDmills. Moreover, if it isn’t the WIND that’s powering the WINDmill covered island, then the Danes must be some kind of magicians? Of course, you don’t believe in that kind of magic; that would be ridiculous. So do you think that the successful Texas entrepreneurs, and the 22 rural village cooperatives, are all incapable of generating ANY affordable electricity with the incorporeal WIND? Which would mean that they are all lying, as well as every journalist who’s ever reported on them…

I hope you can see that real life backs your argument that “wind doesn’t work” into a corner.

Beware of absolutes. Everything is context. What you meant, I’m sure, to say is that wind power alone isn’t enough to energize our nation in its entirety. And in this you’re entirely right; in fact, we’re all entirely right about that. Very few rational people would say that wind can completely replace, say, our mainstay coal.

What we do think is that wind power is a mostly-untapped source of energy that does not increase the amount of poison we dump in the atmosphere, and that we should therefore be supporting its development as a way to stop making worse the problem of global warming. Whatever scam you say happens out East, I can promise you this: deregulation and clean energy standards helped Texas wind energy projects get their feet off the ground; and in Denmark, community-run cooperatives managed to completely transform the island of Samsø.

But I don’t care what political system you think works for all mankind; I just care what works for our grid, our nation, our children. And unless you want to believe that Danes and Texans are habitual, skilled, and elaborate liars, we have before us two great examples of how wind should be part of our future. Just like German and Chinese solar, just like Icelandic geothermal, just like Norwegian and good-old-American hydropower, Danish and Texan projects have made wind energy work.

Shouldn’t we maybe try learning from their experience?

The fact that you talk about ‘efficiency’ betrays you know little about the subject. Nobody talks about efficiency when it comes to wind power. Probably you mean ‘capacity factor’.

The 8% capacity factor (‘efficiency’) in Maine is bollocks, I dare to say that without any data. But let’s fact check your statement anyway. From the wikipedia page about wind power in Maine: “In 2011 wind power facilities in Maine generated 713 million kilowatt hours of electrical energy”. Installed capacity in 2011 was about 500 MW, so that comes to 1400 full load hours, which translates to a capacity factor of 16%.

My guess is that your 8% is the figure from a single month, with low winds or perhaps a single, underperforming wind farm.

Your claim of fraud is hilarious. If it were that obvious, don’t you think more people would complain about it?

But what you conveniently leave out is that the opposite happens too. In periods of high winds, part of that green energy is sold as standard electricity at the standard rate.

It is a matter of bookkeeping. At the end of the year the amount of green energy produced must exactly match the amount sold. Each kWh of green energy reduces fossil generation by 1 kWh. Whether the time at which it was generated coincides exactly with the time that a green energy customer consumed it is irrelevant. The reduction in fossil energy generation is what counts and wind power does that very effectively.