Wind Power Death Parade Morbidly Marches on

There are many reasons to dislike wind power. For some people, giant wind turbines mar scenic vistas. Others don’t like it because it’s an unreliable, expensive source of electricity. I hate it reflexively, because the government forces us to use it, but that’s only an ancillary explanation of my anti-wind beliefs. To me, wind power is most objectionable because it kills things that I enjoy, like human beings.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that there were 281 occupational health “incidents” in the wind power industry last year. Since the late 1970s, wind power has killed 78 people. It is ironic, in the Alanis Morissettian  sense of the word, that global warming has yet to kill anyone, but wind power—a global warming “solution”—has taken out nearly 4 score humans.

Wind power also kills things that my friends enjoy, like golden eagles. A different Los Angeles Times article from yesterday’s edition reported that federal authorities are investigating the deaths of at least six golden eagles at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Pine Tree Wind Project in the Tehachapi Mountains. I wonder why these “federal authorities” are wasting their time on such small beer; another California wind farm in the Bay Area is responsible for chopping up almost 70 golden eagles annually!

And for what? What are the “benefits” of this deadly, expensive, and intermittent source of power? Some wind power advocates would have you believe that it’s all about jobs. This is unconvincing for as long as the industry is wholly a creation of political good will. After all, the Soviet Union “created” jobs in the same way that the Obama Administration has “created” green jobs. To be sure, wind energy lobbyists will tell you that the industry is just around the corner from competing on equal footing with conventional energy, but this claim is belied by these same lobbyists’ doomsday predictions of industry-wide bankruptcy absent government support whenever generous taxpayer subsidies come up for renewal before the Congress.

Other wind energy enthusiasts say that the industry is good for the environment because it emits less “pollution.” Evidence suggests otherwise. On July 19, Bentek, a Colorado-based energy analysis firm, published an important new study, “The Paradox of Wind Power,” finding that “state and federal programs that support wind generation with a goal of substantially reducing pollution instead lead to slight or no emissions savings, along with increased costs for utilities and ultimately ratepayers.”

This inconvenient truth about wind is due to its intermittent nature. The electricity grid is a giant, delicate engineering marvel. At any given time, the electricity that flows into the grid must equal the electricity that is consumed. Demand and supply must remain tightly balanced, or the system would shut down. This is a difficult engineering challenge, one made more so by the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow. The “solution” to wind’s unreliability is to back up wind power with electricity from conventional energy sources, usually hydrocarbon electricity generation. This process is known as “cycling.” Unfortunately, conventional power plants are most inefficient when they are ramped up or down quickly, as they must do when they are backing up wind power. Inefficient power production, moreover, causes more emissions, which renders wind energy far less green than its political supporters would have you believe. Here’s how Bentek President Porter Bennet describes the results of “The Paradox of Wind Power,”

 “BENTEK has used actual hourly wind generation and emissions data to test the hypothesis that wind energy is an effective tool to control CO2 and other air emissions. Policy makers should take note: the actual emissions data over a three-year period refutes these claims. This report requires reassessment of wind as an emission control strategy.”

In the majority of States, Americans are forced to use wind energy, despite the fact that it kills humans and majestic birds, its environmental benefits are apparitional, it’s unreliable and expensive, and it increases the deficit. Is there a better example of why politicians should not be picking winners and losers in the energy market?