A Little Reported Truth About Wind Technology

The media and many of our politicians would have you believe that the future of American electric energy is in green wind and solar technologies. But, the reality is that these technologies are quite expensive to operate without taxpayer support. In fact, a recent report by a group known as Minnesotans for Global Warming, has estimated that 14,000 wind turbines have been abandoned for a lack of government subsidies.

For example, in the Tehachapi pass area of the Mojave Desert of California, there once were 5000 operating wind turbines. The companies that built them have long since come and gone; mostly due to profitability issues. Today, much of those turbines have either been cannibalized for parts or left idle to decay. There's a similar story in Hawaii at the South Point,Kamaoa Wind Farm.

The average American is unaware of these failures because the media isn't reporting them in an attempt to keep "going green" alive and well. Additionally, decaying "wind farms" are usually hidden by the fact they are built in remote areas, and, when the turbines are abandoned, they are typically left standing because it is too expensive to tear them back down and relocate them. This then gives the casual observer the impression that an abandoned wind turbine is actually still operational.

Besides being expensive to operate and maintain, wind turbines are highly unlikely to replace any of our existing gas and coal power plants. Their power output is just too unreliable because mother nature's wind strengths are just too unpredictable and, to date, there is no economical way to store wind-produced energy for those slack wind days. When there is no wind, they produce no power and conventional power generating must be pumped-up to take up the slack. When there's excess wind, those turbines can actually overload the power grid; causing damage and massive outages. Just last May, the Pacific Northwest was hit with just such an "overload induced" outage (Click here to See the Forbes Story: Grid Problems Trigger Rolling Wind-Farm Outages in Pacific Northwest). Then, too, there's the increasing loss of bird and bat lives to these rotating guillotines. On top of everything else, they are just plain noisy and ugly.

I predict that, someday, when the history of energy production in the world is written, wind power will be no more than a negative footnote and not the dominant energy producer that the "greens" of today seem to think it will be.

pb