“An ‘infant industry’ wind power is not.” (Bradley, below)

“At congressional hearings in 1951 to provide increased wind-power funding … Putnam’s blade failure … played right into the hands of those committed to other forms of electrical production: fossil, atomic or solar.” (Wired, below)

The quest to make electricity from wind attracted entrepreneurs well before government mandates and subsidies got involved in the 1970s. As grid power, wind turbines were concept-proven in the 1880s (as were solar panels).

The article below in Wired (October 19, 2009), “Oct. 19, 1941: Electric Turbines Get First Wind was published with the subtitle: “The giant turbine in Vermont was the first wind machine to feed the electrical grid. And then, disaster struck.”

The description below pertains to the 1.25 MW Grandpa’s Knob wind turbine, which during World War II distributed electricity to Central Vermont Public Service Corporation.…

“Looking back with hindsight, the business opportunities were on the generation side, and the utility was going out for bid with all these big renewable-energy projects. But in retrospect, it seems clear, we weren’t as focused on these fire risks as we should have been.”

– Doug McLeod, former Maui county energy commissioner (quoted in WSJ, below)

Opportunity cost is a central concept in economics. Economics is about the unseen versus the seen. Resources spent in one direction are not spent in another. The same goes for corporations as politically correct, economically incorrect priorities crowd out good. Climate change policy is a premier example.

Government-forced substitution of dilute, intermittent energies for reliable incumbents has not only cost taxpayers and ratepayers. It has also cost the environment–dearly. The recent saga of Hawaiian Electric’s preoccupation with “the energy transition” at the expense of grid safety and reliability is the latest example of this.…

Ed. Note: This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a free fortnighly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete Newsletter for this post can be found here.

Greed Energy Economics:
*** Don’t believe the renewables myth: Wind and Solar are not cheap
Chinese manufacturers dominate wind power, taking 60% of global market

Unreliables: Energy Health and Ecosystem Consequences:
*** Video: Assoc Prof Simon Michaux – The quantity of metals required to manufacture just one generation of renewables
*** Carnage of Child Labor and Ecological Destruction Elsewhere acceptable to Wealthy Countries

Unreliables (General):
*** Residents vs Town Council re Solar and Wind Facilities
*** Green Breakdown—The Coming Renewable Energy Failure
*** The Grid as an Energy Weapon — Massive Lithium Storage Centers Spread
*** The Prophet of Power Density
*** There is no green ‘transition’ to renewable energy.…

“The border tax adjustment would be hugely complex given the international supply-chain system, leading to an increase in the attendant bureaucracy even if the regulatory bureaucracy is reduced in size.”

“The CLC proposal is poor conceptually and deeply unserious.”

Six years ago, economist Ben Zycher, the John Searle chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), published an analysis that rings true today–if not more true. “The Deeply-Flawed Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax,” subtitled “’Conservatives’ Endorse the Broken-Windows Fallacy, Reject Evidence and Rigor,” outlined the arguments that once-proud Resources for the Future would not.

Zycher’s piece employed Economics 101 to refute a proposal from the Climate Leadership Council, the Baker-Shultz ‘Carbon Dividends Plan’, that attempted to fool Republicans and conservatives that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a pollutant that the U.S.…