Here we go again, the snake oil medicine show comes to town. Wind power is clean (and darned near useless), wind power saves oil (but it doesn’t, you know – only a few percent of our electricity comes from oil-fired plants).
The fact is, Industrial Wind Energy is a fraud. Without tax credits, production credits and local tax breaks, not one turbine would be built. But the corporate welfare profits are so enormous that energy companies and their financial backers from around the world are homing in on our mountain ridges. And their claims of “homes powered” are downright silly. The wind doesn’t blow in August when everybody’s air conditioning is on high.
Conventional power plants, the ones with smokestacks and smoke, have to be up and running to take up the load when the wind stops. Or we have one heck of a blackout. In Texas they just had a power emergency when the wind stopped. In Europe this winter they had a massive power failure when the wind blew too hard. There is no reduction in greenhouse gases from wind power. None. Wind cannot replace conventional power plants.
I’m getting a little tired of hearing from Frank Maisano, “spokesman for wind developers in the Mid-Atlantic.” Frank works for Bracewell & Guiliani: “one of the higher-profile defenders of the oil, gas and energy industries, to which it provides legal help and extensive lobbying services in Washington. The firm is perhaps the nation’s most aggressive lobbyist for coal-fired power plants, heavy emitters of air pollutants and carbon dioxide, a gas associated with global warming.” – New York Times, May 2, 2007.
Frank used to be a spokesman for the Global Climate Coalition, a group that had serious doubts about global warming.
You’d better take everything he says with a couple grains of salt.
CHARLES BATES
HC 70 Box 402
Sugar Grove, W.Va.
11 April 2008
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/04/11/13430/