Editor Note: Jon Boone, a lifelong environmentalist, co-founded the North American Bluebird Society and has consulted for the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in New York. He has been a formal intervenor in two Maryland Public Service Commission hearings and produced and directed the documentary, Life Under a Windplant.

Industrial wind technology is a meretricious commodity, attractive in a superficial way but without real value—seemingly plausible, even significant but actually false and nugatory.

Those who would profit from it either economically or ideologically are engaged in wholesale deception. For in contrast to their alluring but empty promises of closed coal plants and reduced carbon emissions is this reality: Wind energy is impotent while its environmental footprint is massive and malignant.

A wind project with a rated capacity of 100 MW, for example, with 40 skyscraper-sized turbines, would likely produce an annual average of only 27 MW, an imperceptible fraction of energy for most grid systems.…

“We can push solar, and that’s great. But somebody’s got to pay for it. You can’t have those who can barely afford their energy bills subsidizing it.”

– Texas Rep. Sylvester Turner, quoted in the Houston Chronicle

The Houston Democrat made a national statement, not just statewide one, in reference to proposed legislation to surcharge ratepayers to subsidize solar roofs. Such sentiment beat back a well-funded effort by national environmental pressure groups and the solar industry. Has the decade-old Enron-launched artificial stimulus to uneconomic, unreliable renewables reached its apogee? Might existing and planned renewable programs enacted at the expense of ratepayers and taxpayers be reconsidered by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the 82nd Texas Legislature in 2011?

Background

The Texas Legislature, which meets every two years, fell to Enron and environmental lobbyists back in 1999 when the nation’s strictest renewable energy mandate was passed and signed into law by then Gov.…

Yesterday, the National Clean Energy Product Summit was held in Washington, DC to discuss the Center for American Progress’ s February 2009 white paper titled “Wired for Progress: Building a National Clean-Energy Smart Grid.”  Participants included Steven Chu, Al Gore, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., T. Boone Pickens, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and pretty much everyone else who thinks they know a priori how to most efficiently organize and manage the electricity sector.   As one might expect, no good came of it.…