Put Wind Farms In Your Pipe & Smoke ‘Em

Admit it: You also hate those ugly metallic windmills dotting our country’s landscape & now Trump told the inconvenient truth that wind farms only work because of massive gov’t subsidies. Put that in your pipe progressives & smoke it …

That was also the conclusion of the WSJ’s editorial board as they quoted Trump recently as saying: “The only people that want [wind farms] are the people that are getting rich off windmills, getting massive subsidies from the US government … [yet] it’s the most expensive energy there is. It’s many, many times more expensive than clean natural gas …? The editors mused how “the media’s fact-checkers pounced & proclaimed that wind energy is among the cheapest & fastest growing power sources.” One problem with that take, they noted, is “that’s only because of rich subsidies, which were sweetened by the Inflation Reduction Act.” In fact, they argued, federal tax credits can cover 50% of the cost of building an offshore wind farm & more than 80% of the cost onshore. In addition, even Biden’s own Energy Dept conceded in a 2023 report that power from new onshore wind farms costs more than from gas-fired plants, even if you exclude subsidies. On the other hand, the WSJ opined, “offshore wind costs two to three times more than gas power even with subsidies.”

Crunch the numbers any way you want, then, but gas beats the wind farms. And, we haven’t even gotten into the extraordinary costs of backing up wind generation. Says the editors: “Power from so-called peaker plants & batteries costs three to four times more than from baseload generators.” Put another way, “it’s far cheaper to run gas, coal & nuclear plants around the clock than to use wind (and solar) some of the time & have to back them up with other forms of energy.”

Davd Soul