Last month, our friends over at the Heartland Institute published a front-page lead story in the April, 2009 edition of Environment & Climate News. Alyssia Carducci’s “Palin Energy Plan Receives High Praise” begins:

“Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has announced an ambitious plan to produce half of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2025. Palin’s plan, which empowers local municipalities to identify and develop the most cost-efficient renewable power sources available to them, won immediate praise from environmental groups, consumer groups, and industry.”

This article is yet more evidence that the inexplicable conservative love affair with Sarah Palin remains unrequited—at least, when it comes to economic policy in general and energy policy in particular. But Republicans, as the kids might say, “She’s just not that into you.” Let’s examine the litany of problems with Plain’s approach to energy.…

“When an abundant natural fall of water is at hand, nothing can be cheaper or better than water power. But everything depends upon local circumstances. The occasional mountain torrent is simply destructive. Many streams and rivers only contain sufficient water half the year round and costly reservoirs alone could keep up the summer supply. In flat countries no engineering art could procure any considerable supply of natural water power, and in very few places do we find water power free from occasional failure by drought.”

– W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865), p. 129.

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times has presented Costa Rica as a model for the energy world, noting its reliance on renewable energy (hydro) to generate electricity. In response, we posted last week about how such dependence had left it vulnerable to the vagaries of rainfall, and (to a much lesser degree) wind.…

The disadvantage of windpower as a primary energy source has been long recognized. This 1838 textbook described the competitive situation of wind as follows:

 William Stanley Jevons also detailed the problems of windpower…

Windpower is certainly a candidate for the perfect imperfect energy.

It is uneconomic to produce and more uneconomic to transmit. It is unreliable moment-to-moment (the intermittency problem). It is at its worst when it needs to be at its best (those hot summer days). Its aesthetics are bad.  It attracts the worst political capitalists (the late Ken Lay, the current T. Boone Pickens). W. S. Jevons was right in 1865 when he concluded that windpower was unsuitable for the industrial age.

Add another problem that is worse for windpower than conventional electric generation: weather risk.…