And after windmills, we can bring back the nuclear-powered strategic bomber

A 200-megawatt wind energy project near Searchlight, Nevada (home town of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) has been approved by the federal government.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday the project will be built on almost 19,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land about 60 miles southeast of Las Vegas.

The project will occasionally generate enough electricity to power about 70,000 homes, according to the Interior Department.

It’s expected to create about 275 jobs during construction, and 15 jobs for operations — and to generate about $18.6 million in property and sales taxes for local government, the agency said.

Any local construction project is welcome in the face of Southern Nevada’s ongoing economic doldrums, of course. And wind energy projects are essentially “two-fers” — if it takes 275 workers to build this thing, it will presumably take almost that many workers to tear it down, after a combination of post-subsidy economic reality and environmental lawsuits over bird and bat slaughter lead to the whole thing being idled, as has already happened to thousands of windmills in Hawaii and California.

Mind you, no one could possibly object to private entrepreneurs buying land and erecting wind farms if they believe they can make a profit on such a venture, absent government subsidies and mandates that utilities buy the power regardless of cost — which is just a different kind of subsidy, with the cost handed to all of us in our electric bills.

In fact, it would be interesting to compare that supposed “$18.6 million in property and sales tax revenue” to what state and local governments might receive if this 19,000 acres were sold off to private developers (as all Nevada BLM lands should be sold to private parties), who were then “allowed” to build there a series of profitable, modern, coal-fired power plants.

At least the coal-fired plants wouldn’t have to be backed up by an equivalent capacity in quick-fire natural gas turbines, always needed to replace the “loading” of wind generators when they go off line.

“Literal beacons of the ‘green’ energy movement, giant wind turbines have been one of the renewable energy sources of choice for the U.S. government, which has spent billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing their construction and use across the country,” wrote Jonathan Benson for Naturalnews.com, a Taiwan-based non-profit collection of public education websites, in November of 2011.

“But high maintenance costs, high rates of failure, and fluctuating weather conditions that affect energy production render wind turbines expensive and inefficient, which is why more than 14,000 of them have since been abandoned,” Mr. Benson continued.

Well, that and the environmental lawsuits, attempting to reduce the slaughter of hawks, eagles, owls, and bats.

“Before government subsidies … were cut or eliminated in many areas, wind farms were an energy boom business,” Mr. Benson offers. “But in the post-tax subsidy era, the costs of maintaining and operating wind turbines far outweighs the minimal power they generate in many areas, which has left a patchwork of wind turbine graveyards in many of the most popular wind farming areas of the U.S.”

Andrew Walden, writing for the American Thinker, picks up the account:

“Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy’s California ‘big three’ locations which include Altamont Pass, Tehachapin and San Gorgonio, considered among the world’s best wind sites,” Mr. Walden writes. “In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.”

In England, Britain’s wind farms are wearing out far more rapidly than previously thought, making them more expensive as a result, reported Robert Mendick for the London Telegraph on Dec. 30, 2012.

“The analysis of almost 3,000 onshore wind turbines — the biggest study of its kind –warns that they will continue to generate electricity effectively for just 12 to 15 years.”

The wind energy industry and the British government had been basing all their calculations on turbines enjoying a life span of 20 to 25 years. That means routine wear and tear will more than double the cost of electricity being produced by wind farms in the next decade. “Many more will need to be built onshore if the Government is to meet renewable energy targets by 2020, with the extra cost likely to be passed on to households, which already pay about 1billion pounds a year in a consumer subsidy added to their electric bills.”

And this follows the same paper’s December, 2008 report that “The wind farm industry has been forced to admit that the environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as big as it had previously claimed.”

(Newspeak alert: “Carbon emissions,” in this context, means not gritty back soot, which can indeed be nasty, but rather clean, clear carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas necessary to life on earth.)

But it’s OK. It’ll all be subsidized by Uncle Sam, who gets all the money he needs simply by printing it, with no inflationary impact on the economy, at all. Gasoline and groceries don’t cost any more today than they did in 2008 … or 1968 . . . or 1928 . . . right?

By the time they’re done building these windmills, maybe the Burning Man kids can even be brought in to burn them down. When you’ve got lemons, make lemonade.

2 Comments to “And after windmills, we can bring back the nuclear-powered strategic bomber”

  1. Howard R Music Says:

    They are putting these things up all over Texas. Hundreds have been constructed in a beautiful area south of Abilene. As you mentioned, when the subsidies run out, who is going to pay for an expensive crane and crew to take them down? I have a feeling they’ll be blighting the landscape for generations, unless a tornado knocks them down.
    Enjoy your articles.

  2. Lava Says:

    So, the windmill doesn’t store energy for later, when the wind stops blowing – ?

    Maybe you could compare wind-electric generation to sailing.

    Wind power is still used for a few pleasure craft. No one suggests that the entire shipping industry go back to sails, though!

    Does anyone know the outcome of the wind power project(s) in Minnesota?