There is a rather excellent piece at the Powerline Blog about the reasons why Green energy is doomed to fail. The bottom line in his piece is land use and the infrastructure to bring the energy from where it is generated to the NIMBY folk who want the energy but not the infrastructure is dramatic to say the least.
When “green” advocates tabulate the costs of wind and solar energy, they generally don’t include the thousands of miles of transmission lines that are required to bring electricity from the rural areas that are stuck with “green” development to the urban areas where the electricity is used. But such transmission lines represent a huge economic and environmental issue:
Connecting lots of wind and solar to the grid also requires appropriating land for transmission projects. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, converting the domestic electric grid to run on renewables will require roughly doubling the amount of high-voltage transmission capacity in the U.S. At present, the U.S. has about 240,000 miles of high-voltage transmission. Therefore, renewables conversion means adding enough high-voltage transmission lines to circle the Earth about 10 times.
The piece and the report it cites is excellent however there is one glaring error that I would like to point out and it’s an error in terms of premise.
The premise of the piece is that green energy is “doomed to failure” however that is incorrect. Not because it won’t provide the energy needs it claims, it won’t but because the goal of green energy is not to provide energy but to provide cash, from the piece:
So why does the “green dream” persist? In part, because it is inflicted on children from elementary school on. But mostly because there is a great deal of money in it. This chart shows the volume of U.S. tax incentives per unit of energy produced for various energy sources:
“Green” energy holds political sway, which has made a relative handful of people (largely non-Americans and lobbyists) immensely wealthy, while impoverishing utility rate payers and taxpayers–that is to say, the rest of us.
“Green” energy is all about the green that is all about the green that lobbyists can get from US taxpayers for their clients and the political kickbacks in terms of both contributions and jobs for the connected and their families in these industries all paid for by you.
If you remember that this is the actual goal, to grease the connected at the taxpayer expense rather than produce clean power for the public then Green energy not only hasn’t failed but it has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.
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