Wind power again reaps subsidy

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is at the forefront of letting Americans know just how bad an investment our country is making in wind power, as well as other forms of renewable energy. A recent Review and Outlook piece titled The Wind Subsidy Bubble: Green pork should be a GOP budget target holds these facts:

• The recent tax bill has a $3 billion grant for wind projects.
• The 2009 stimulus bill had $30 billion for wind.
• Wind power installations are way down from recent years.
• The 2008 stimulus bill forces taxpayers to pay 30% of a renewable energy project’s costs. Wind energy also get a tax credit for each unit of power produced.
• “Subsidies for renewable energy cost taxpayers about $475,000 for every job generated.”
• “The wind industry claims to employ 85,000 Americans. That’s almost certainly an exaggeration, but if it is true it compares with roughly 140,000 miners and others directly employed by the coal industry. Wind accounts for a little more than 1% of electricity generation and coal almost 50%. So it takes at least 25 times more workers to produce a kilowatt of electricity from wind as from coal.”

This information is timely as Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson recently released a list of his “achievements,” three of which involve increasing wind power in Kansas.

Incoming Kansas governor Sam Brownback is in favor of wind energy too, and he also supports federal subsidies and mandates for ethanol production and use. In endorsing Brownback the Kansas Association of Ethanol Producers said “… no other public official has done more to promote the merits of ethanol than Sam Brownback. Whereas ethanol is the future of America’s fuel supply, Sam Brownback is the future of Kansas.”

The Wall Street Journal has also long been opposed to this intervention in the market for ethanol, recently quoting a report by a group of U.S. Senators: “Historically our government has helped a product compete in one of three ways: subsidize it, protect it from competition, or require its use. We understand that ethanol may be the only product receiving all three forms of support from the U.S. government at this time.”