Thirteen months ago, Denise Bode, the head lobbyist for the American Wind Energy Association, declared that the "U.S. wind industry is in distress."
If last year was bad for the U.S. wind industry, then 2011 is looking to be positively disastrous. A combination of cheap natural gas, growing resistance to wind turbine installations, and the inability of cash-strapped governments to continue hefty subsidies, is taking the wind out of wind.
For AWEA's minions and hirelings, these facts are truly dangerous. And because of that, they continue to use character assassination on anyone who questions the future of their highly subsidized industry.
But AWEA's own data shows that the wind industry is becalmed. During the first half of this year, the U.S. installed just 2,151 megawatts of new capacity. That means that 2011 may be even worse for the domestic wind industry than 2010, when U.S. wind generation capacity grew by 5,100 megawatts. And that 2010 total was about half of the 10,010 megawatts added in 2009. Indeed, this year domestic wind additions may be smaller than at anytime since at least 2006.
Let's start with the most important issue: low-cost natural gas. About three years ago, one of the wind industry's biggest boosters, T. Boone Pickens, was claiming that natural gas prices had to be at least $9 for wind energy to be competitive. In March 2010, Pickens was still hawking wind energy, but he'd lowered his price threshold saying, "The place where it works best is with natural gas at $7." By January of this year, a chastened Pickens was explaining that you can't "finance a wind deal unless you have $6 gas."
That may be true, but on the spot market, natural gas now sells for about $4 per million Btu. Today's relatively low natural gas prices are a direct result of the drilling industry's new-found prowess at unlocking huge quantities of methane from shale beds. Those lower prices are great for consumers, but terrible for the wind business. And worse yet for the wind business is this: many of the sharpest analysts in the natural gas sector expect low-cost natural gas -- that is gas at around $4 -- will persist for several years to come.
Local resistance to industrial wind projects is also growing, a fact that AWEA claims is due to "NIMBYs." AWEA's use of that word is a slur on those who are trying to protect the value of their homes and property against industrial wind projects.
Here's the reality: the backlash against industrial wind is real, it's global, and it's growing. The U.S. has about 170 anti-wind groups. AWEA doesn't want you to know that a number of towns in New York state have prohibited the construction of industrial wind turbines. In April, the town of Falmouth, Massachusetts enacted a year-long moratorium on construction of new wind turbines. And earlier this month, a pair of environmental groups in Massachusetts called for a ban on new turbines in the state until more work is done on the health effects of wind turbine noise.
The wind lobby is desperate to downplay the problem of infrasound from wind turbines. But this month, in a peer-reviewed article in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Carl V. Phillips, a Harvard-trained PhD, concludes that there is "overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually stress-disorder type diseases, at a nontrivial rate."
The subsidies for wind energy are in peril. A recent report from the Energy Information Administration shows that in 2010, the wind energy sector got more federal subsidies than any other energy sector other than biofuels. The report found that wind energy got a total of $4.986 billion in subsidies, or nearly twice as much as was given to the oil and gas sector, which got $2.82 billion. The majority of the wind energy money came from the federal stimulus package passed in 2009. But much of that stimulus money has been spent.
Last December, AWEA cheered after Congress approved a tax bill that included a one-year extension of the investment tax credit for renewable energy. But another high-profile renewable energy subsidy, the tax credit for the corn ethanol scam, is due to expire at the end of this year. And given that Republicans in Washington are eager to cut all types of federal spending, the investment tax credit is likely to, once again, be in legislators' cross hairs.
Bode was right a year ago when she said the wind industry is in distress. Her industry's still in peril today because it cannot survive without mandates and taxpayer subsidies. And unless or until it can, she cannot expect any sympathy from cash-strapped voters.
Follow Robert Bryce on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pwrhungry
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To be logically consistent then Mr. Bryce, I would expect you to endorse the repeal of ALL the tax subsidies to the fossil fuel industries, who are, after all, making record profits.
No one has (yet) figured out how to separate the Wind Rights from the Surface Rights.
Once this is done, it will be as easy to force landowners to allow wind turbines as it is to force them to accept oil drilling. Until then, the inherently more-fair shake that the landowner gets from the wind industry annoys the heck out of the fossil fuel folks....who are proving once again that American businesses >talk< about the 'competitive free market' but hate nothing more than real competition.
As a person who has lived next door to an Oklahoma stripper well for the last 30 years, I can tell you that there are considerable costs: ruined pastures from brine run off; poisoned farm ponds; the noise of the pumpjack and the various pumps by the collecting tanks. Oh, and don't forget the lost privacy caused by the oil field folks coming onto your property whenever they darn well want to, because, after all, it IS their oil.
On the other hand, the 'awl bidness' has supported right-wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute since back in the days when National Review, ostensibly an intellectual journal, carried ads for oil well-drilling bits. Congratulations on carrying on the tradition.
A program focused on PV and efficiency IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT will hugely reduce GHGs IMMEDIATELY rather than emitting massive, massive amounts of GHGs with the steel and cement production and the SF6-spewing long transmission lines (plus the lost CO2 sequestration and dead raptors/bats). We have killed enough landscape! We need to use the already-dead ecosystems of our neighborhoods, cities, Superfund sites, brownfields, and fallowed ag lands to reduce our energy consumption comfortably, and produce the energy we need.
We need to stop handing over our future to Big Energy, and that includes Big Wind and Big Solar - it's time WE participated in the clean energy economy as more than consumers - as ratepayer-generators being fairly compensated for all the power we can produce. Germany has been successfully installing rooftop PV for years and they are ecstatic about the local economic benefits, improved property values, huge number of jobs, their grid stability and their reduction of GHGs - and because they created so much demand, the price of panels has dropped in half - imagine what the purchasing power of the US could do!
When solar and wind and waste bio fuels start to cut into fossil and nukes profits, the giant multinationals will run the fossils and nukes at a loss for as long as it takes to kill green energy.
That's why green energy needs subsidies, and fossil and nukes, must not get subsidies.
Meanwhile wind offers fixed-price, 20- to 30-year contracts. No wonder electric utilities want it in their portfolios, and wind is right behind gas with 35% of new electrical generating capacity in the U.S. since 2007.
Wind's so-called "subsidies" are really just a reasonable tax rate that allows wind to compete with 90-plus years of permanent fossil fuel subsidies, and that generates additional economic activity which pays further taxes. The last thing politicians should do is to raise the tax rate on wind energy from where it has been since 2003 -- helping Iowa, for instance, make 20% of its electricity from wind, and meanwhile employ people at over 200 companies in 55 counties.
The wind industry is hardly becalmed: Installations are up 42% in the second quarter over last year’s rate. Close to 8 gigawatts are now under construction in the U.S., the most in three years.
And wind is a responsible industry based on science, continued technological breakthroughs, and positive community relations in many more places than the few Mr. Bryce chooses to focus on and exaggerate.
He uses as ammunition an EIA report that was initially withheld for quality concerns, then issued with a long string of qualifiers because it leaves out decades of fossil fuel advantages. Let the buyer beware of Mr. Bryce's byline.
As for subsidies the reason wind has grown is because of subsidies sign by President Bush. These subsidies are more than double natural gas & petroleum. Under President Clinton these subsidies for renewables were about $1.4 billion in 2007 they were about $4.9 billion. Subsidies for natural gas and petroleum held steady at about $2 billion.
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/execsum.pdf
That being said I think there is or should be a symbiotic relationship between natural gas and wind energy for when the wind doesn't blow. Otherwise save the natural gas for my bus!
http://scalinggreen.com/2011/06/robert-bryce-spreads-more-falsehoods-about-clean-energy/
http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/08/01/284728/eia-subsidy-rate-for-wind-power-has-dropped-90-percent/
Add in the health and environmental cost of the coal and natural gas (approximately +18.7 cents per kilowatt hour) and "Big Wind" begins to look like a real threat. Which explains why this toady's pumping out misinformation at such a frenetic pace. Astroturfing is this guy's middle name...
HuffPo's always thirsty for content, but come on!
As for the health cost of fossil fuels - I know they are in the billions or trillions, I just don't understand why asthma (a good indicator of air quality) steadily increased from 1980 and peaked in 2007?
Surely you are not going to argue that the air of 2007 was worse from coal pollution in 2007 than 1980? I mean that would have made the whole EPA and Clean air act pointless!
Do you think kids spending more time indoors playing video games could have something to do with it? In door air will kill you!
The truth be told I'm a fan of both natural gas and wind and think natural gas should be used to back up wind.
So let's argue the points and not dwell on character assassination! What are we members of congress?
A hitch there is that balancing wind requires less efficient open-cycle gas turbines, whereas the much more efficient combined-cycle gas turbines may well release less carbon per unit of electricity than the combination of open-cycle plus wind.
And the career of the spokesman for mid-Atlantic wind developers, Frank Maisano of Bracewell & Giuliani, has been as a lobbyist against environmental regulation, particularly concerning carbon emissions.
Local, democratically-owned solutions produce more power, cheaper, and far more cleanly (efficiency, passive heating/cooling, rooftop PV) - that is where our country should be focused!