“But the truth is that Ohio’s renewable energy mandates have largely benefited only one group: entrenched monopoly fossil utilities like AEP, Iberdrola, and corporate behemoths like GE.”

Senate Bill 310’s attempt to freeze Ohio’s renewable energy mandate has elicited the typical partisan howls from Ohio’s green energy profiteers. They have been quick to paint the supporters of SB310 as slavish supporters of the much maligned Koch Brothers, FirstEnergy or other “dark fossil corporate profiteers”.

Curiously, these environmental group’s normally exquisitely tuned “corporate conspiracy radar” appears to have developed a massive wind-turbine-sized blind spot.

Consider:

• In 1998 it was Enron’s Ken Lay who  implored George W. Bush to extend subsidies for wind energy.  A quick scan of his letter reveals talking points that today could easily be mistaken for the Ohio Sierra Club: “Wind is the fastest growing new electrical generation technology in the world today and has rapidly decreased its production costs until it is close to being competitive with conventional generation technologies.”

“Even with carbon emissions valued at $50 per metric ton, nuclear, hydro and natural gas combined cycle generation plants have far more net benefits than either wind or solar.”

The recent paper by Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, “The Net Benefits of Low and No-Carbon Electricity Technologies” provides a reasonably broad, detailed analysis of the lack of value in pursing policies of implementing wind and solar industrial-scale generation plants to reduce carbon emissions. This analysis, however, while on track, misses some very important considerations that strengthen the already negative verdict.

In summary, the paper finds:

• Even with carbon emissions valued at $50 per metric ton, nuclear, hydro and natural gas combined cycle (combined cycle gas turbine, or CCGT) generation plants have far more net benefits than either wind or solar, because the latter have a very high capacity cost per megawatt (MW), very low capacity factors, and low reliability.

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science. It’s all spelled out at WiseEnergy.org, which is a wealth of energy and environmental resources.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Greed Energy Economics:

How Warren Buffett Milks Consumers & Taxpayers Through Wind Energy

NY State May Fold RPS Program

Fascinating Wind Tax Assessment Case

Bill to pause green-energy standards passes Ohio Senate

Farmers: Turbine decisions to become more difficult

Warren Buffet: Wind energy doesn’t make sense without the PTC…

“Political stabilization … allowed men to relax, to hope that crises might be avoided, to enjoy the bountiful fortunes they had already made.”

– Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: The Free Press, 1963), p. 285.

“Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”

– Gabriel Kolko, ibid., p. 5.

Gabriel Kolko, a New Left historian who popularized the term political capitalism, and documented the role of business in initiating and furthering government intervention in the free-market economy, died this week at age 81.

I have mixed feelings about Kolko (1932–2014) as a scholar. (I never personally met him.) I grew up taking his work at face value, following my intellectual mentor Murray Rothbard.…