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US Firms Race Fiscal Cliff To Install Wind Turbines
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that U.S. energy companies are racing to install wind turbines before a federal tax credit expires at the end of this year which could be lost as Congress struggles with new legislation to avoid the 'fiscal cliff.' 'There's a lot of rushing right now to get projects completed by the end of the year,' says Rob Gramlich, senior vice president at the American Wind Energy Association. 'There's a good chance we could get this extension, it is very hard to predict, but the industry is not making bets on the Congress getting it done,' Even if there is an extension there is likely to be a significant curtailment of wind installations in 2013. From 1999 to 2004, Congress allowed the wind energy production tax credit to expire three times, each time retroactively extending it several months after the expiration deadline had passed, but wind energy companies say they need longer time frames to negotiate deals to sell the power they generate. 'Even if the tax credit is extended, our new construction plans likely will be ramped back substantially in 2013 compared with the last few years,' says Paul Copleman. 'So much time has passed without certainty that a normal one-year extension would not be a game-changer for our 2013 build plans.'"
All this hot wind about tax credits... I think it will break soon. And this whole thing will blow over.
A perfect reflection of the people that voted for them.
Actually, it demonstrably isn't. Some reasons why:
1. Gerrymandering. For example, the party that got the most votes won't hold the most seats in Congress come the next term.
2. This is a lame duck session. So it's actually a reflection of the electorate from 2 years ago, not the current electorate.
3. The "money primary", where candidates must impress potential donors to even have a chance of impressing the electorate, ensures that proposals that might hurt large donors are never even considered.
There are many opinions widely held by the American public that are nowhere near actually getting through Congress. For instance, a majority of Americans would approve the federal legalization of marijuana, but such a proposal has never even come close to getting a floor vote in Congress.
I am officially gone from
What's worse is the wind turbines, perhaps because Ontario is in the centre of the continent, generate most of their power during the shoulder periods of power demand.
That doesn't matter, so long as the wind generation capacity you have is less than your fossil fuel capacity. As long as that's true, you can think of it almost like having a super-efficient storage method for the wind power your generate: you "store" it as unburned fossil fuel.
Only *after* your wind generating capability exceeds your non-renewable energy sources,does the wind power you can't sell "goes to waste". But then it was going to waste anyhow. You're still thinking of renewable energy sources like non-renewable ones. It doesn't matter if you don't capture and use every bit of a renewable energy source, because there's always more of it coming. What matters is can you make the dollars and cents work. It's quite possible for a 10% efficient solar array to be successful yet a 50% efficient one to be a financial failure. It depends on the cost of producing, siting, installing and maintaining the array vs. the value of the electricity it produces. The 90% of energy you waste with the inefficient cells doesn't matter; 100% was going to waste before you installed them.
It may well be that your government set up a bad deal, but that's just lack of financial acumen, not a problem with the technology.
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But is hydroelectricity worth a dam?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If the "torch-bearing mob" you're referring to was Occupy Wall Street, they didn't have any torches or pitchforks, they had signs and chants and meetings which clearly presented no physical threat to the banks. The New York police responded to them by:
- pepper-spraying them for the heinous crime of walking down a sidewalk
- beating them with batons
- In one case, running a guy over with a motorcycle, arresting him for being in the way, and then denying medical treatment of his broken leg
- Pushing them into the street and then arresting them for jaywalking
- In policing a planned march over the Brooklyn bridge, waited until as many as possible were on the bridge, then blocked both exits and arresting everyone in between
- Put an end to the protest by barging in at 3 AM to a public park, beating and kicking the sleeping people who didn't move fast enough, and destroying all the personal property that they could get their hands on
- In the aftermath, some of the people known to have been protesting were fired from their jobs
So that's why people avoid protest movements in the US: If it has a chance of changing something, it will be violently suppressed. In one of the related protests in other cities, the police repeatedly pepper-sprayed an 82-year-old woman who hadn't gotten out of the way fast enough, and ended up killing an Iraq War veteran (probably accidentally, but still).
I am officially gone from
Citation needed for $0.80/kWh for wind. Even ridiculously overpriced wind farms elsewhere are at $0.20/kWh. Anholt Sea Wind Farm, widely criticized for having its proposal structured in such a way that there could only be a single bidder and therefore monopoly pricing, is at 1.05DKK/kWh or 0.19USD/kWh for the first 20TWh. 20TWh should be reached in approximately 13 years.
$0.03/kWh is only possible for nuclear reactors which have paid off their capital investment already and are only paying for maintenance. Wind power under the same conditions can produce at lower cost than that.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
If tax credits and rebates are what make wind profitable.
Lots of industries start with various forms of government subsidy. The mistake made in ontario was thinking that the price of wind turbines was going to remain as high as it was for a lot longer.
The government was trying to convince the public that wind generators weren't going to destroy property values, deafen children etc. They were willing to take a loss on this up front in the hopes that by the time generation came down in price people wouldn't put up a huge protest about it. Unfortunately for the government, the price came down far faster than anyone anticipated, which is good for basically everyone else.
Had they stayed hugely expensive the government would be basically subsidizing half a dozen wind turbines here and there to show off, which, on the scale of things costs basically nothing, and if it made it easier to convince people to install a few thousand of them 20 years from now so much the better. But the price came down much faster than they anticipated.
It has nothing to do with nuclear.
Ontario's nuke capacity is about 11GW max but the lowest demand for any hour going back over 10 years is 13GW so the balance is made up by hydro, gas, wind and coal.
The coal usage has been cut back significantly in the last 5-7 yrs and the max wind output has only recently exceeded 1GW.
From what I understand, the issue is the wind farms were given "must-take" status for their power which is stupid during low-demand hours but that's policy and fixable.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body