There was shock, surprise, and humor in the media when Trump not only denounced wind “mills” for intermittency, lack of predictable value, property losses, and bird kills but also topped his discussion with

“They say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Is President Trump correct in his five critical points? Even the last one? Or is it possible, as Trevor Noah suggested, turbines might be the only things that don’t cause cancer.

1. Intermittency

Electricity must be consumed the moment it is produced. Storage to allow deviations is prohibitively expensive in all but the rarest of settings. And it has always been this way.

Trump said, “Honey I’d like to watch TV tonight: are the turbines working?” And then his quotation from the Washington Republican fundraiser:

“Is the wind blowing?…

“Veering from this original intent of regulation — driven by overreaching politics — risks regulators’ ability to achieve their core objective of protecting consumers…. Unfulfilling these core obligations constitutes what I and others consider regulatory failure that raises doubts on the social desirability of public utility regulation.”

“… subsidies — often the result of increased politicization — can be unfair to funding parties (namely, ratepayers), economically inefficient, and unfair to competing energy sources.  One common bizarre practice is for electric utilities to subsidize their customers to use less of their service via energy efficiency initiatives….”

Public utility regulation falls within the lexicon economic regulation with its main objective to protect consumers from  the monopoly power of a utility. The presumption is that public utilities provide essential services that require strong service obligations and price controls.…

If Texas A&M scientists calculated that an asteroid was heading our way, we would likely head for the hills with a lot of pills. But when this university’s climatology department warns of dangerous man-induced global warming and calls for government action (think new taxes and regulation), roll your eyes and watch the wallet. [But] we live in a postmodern world where emotion and desire substitute for humility and scholarship. 

 – Robert Bradley, “Political Scientists: Gerald North and Andrew Dessler Double Down on Climate Alarmism,” October 11, 2013.

Andrew Dessler is an alarmist/activist climate scientist. He is very certain of his positions on the hard science questions (what Judith Curry warns is really an uncertainty monster). Dessler also veers outside of his expertise to confidently assess the prospects for (government) forced energy transformation away from fossil fuels, the area of political economy. …

“The private sector’s push for rural electrification would be forgotten as electrifying the countryside became a political issue during the New Deal, specifically with the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935.”

– Robert Bradley, Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies (2011), p. 165.

“Next to their ability to pump water mechanistically, small wind turbines are best known for their ability to generate power at remote homesteads…. During the 1930s, when only 10% of U.S. farms were served by central-station power, literally hundreds of thousands of [“home light plants”] were in use on the Great Plains…. [This industry] collapsed quickly after the introduction of electricity by the Rural Electrification Administration during the 1930s.”

– Paul Gipe. Wind Energy Comes of Age (1995), pp. 125, 131.

The New Deal’s policies toward oil and coal in the 1933–39 era were hardly succeeded from anyone’s perspective.…