Coal-Fired Electric Plants of China Give it Edge in World Clean Energy Market

Energy Secretary Steven Chu argues we should make ourselves more competitive in the growing green energy industries by taxing carbon with the carbon cap-and-trade Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act of Kerry and Boxer in the Senate.  He claims China is investing heavily in wind and solar power manufacturing and will clean our clock if we do not pass cap-and-trade taxation.  Marlo Lewis points out that this is nonsense.

China does not tax carbon dioxide emissions.  It is producing wind and solar products for export, not internal use.  It is producing electricity now more cheaply with coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the state of Massachusetts is one of the very foolish states already in a cap-and-trade program known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.  Ten states of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have pledged to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector by 10% by 2018.  This puts them at a competitive disadvantage for power costs and power reliability with respect to many other sates, so they are desperate to get the federal government to make at least such draconian power cuts for the remaining states of the Union.  But, let us examine how this cap-and-trade effort is benefiting manufacturer's of green energy products.

Massachusetts gave Evergreen Solar $58.6 million to build a factory in Devens, MA.  A little more than a year after opening the plant, Evergreen announced it was moving its solar panel assembly operations to China, where the costs of production are lower.  It plans to keep wafer and solar cell production in Devens.  One of the lower costs in China is that of energy.  In the first 9 months of this year, Evergreen lost $167 million.  The market price of assembled solar panels has fallen 30% in the last year.  Apparently, even with heavy subsidies, solar power companies have a very difficult time competing with both other forms of energy production and lower cost of production overseas competitors.  The free market is not kind to solar power and even extensive subsidies and favorable mandates at taxpayer expense leave many of these companies unable to compete.  Massachusetts Gov. Patrick and Obama both are going to be disappointed by the number of American jobs actually produced by green energy.

When the free market says a company is uncompetitive, it is very poor public sector policy to spend taxpayer money on it or to force consumers to buy its high-priced products.

Wind Power Delays and Limits

Recently, wind power has been in the news locally here in Maryland. In one case, the concern is that many bats are dying at the sites of wind farms in western Maryland, West Virginia, and nearby areas of Pennsylvania. For some time, there was puzzlement as to why bats would fly into turbine blades despite their sonar capabilities. A recent report in The Washington Times notes that researchers have found out that when the blades are spinning there are low pressure areas in which the pressure is low enough that the bats lungs explode and they die even without collisions with the blades. The article says this is a relief, since there is an easy solution. The bats only fly in large numbers when the wind is moderate, so the wind generators can simply be shut down when the wind velocity is moderate!

Half the time when I see a wind farm the generator blades are not turning at all. There is usually more wind at night than during the day, so a disproportionate fraction of the electricity generated is already at night when electricity use is lower than during the day. Now, in the interest of the bats, the wind turbines will be shut down an even larger fraction of the time at many eastern sites with goodly bat populations. And bats are not the only species which require protection. Here is an account of the travails in building a wind farm in western Maryland where the project was redesigned in the interests of the mourning warbler, mountain wood fern, summer sedge, Allegheny wood rat, and the timber rattlesnake. The number of turbines was reduced from 24 to 17, while the height of each generator was increased from 387 feet to 548 feet for the highest part of the blade in its sweep. The farm is rated at 40 MW, but farms commonly put out a very small fraction of their rated power.

Another interesting local story about wind generators is one of a number of farmers who bought their own smaller generators for $20,000 apiece in anticipation of getting a $10,000 refund per generator from the Federal government. But...the local authorities will not permit the farmers to put their wind generators up. So, the farmers are stuck with a useless $20,000 of capital on the ground, which is neither generating power nor Federal subsidies. Meanwhile, the time limit for the Federal subsidy money is running out.

Lately, I have been seeing an ad on TV for photovoltaic power plants in which rows of solar arrays seem to stretch very far beyond the woman touting solar power for miles. The panels are large and raised well off the ground and the ground looks absolutely flat, packed down, and barren. She talks about covering many square miles of the Southwest with such environmentally friendly and non-CO2 producing operations. Now, can anyone be in their right mind who believes that the environmentalists will allow many, many square miles of the southwest to be covered with such barren structures. Within these areas there are to be no flora and no fauna. These areas are to become as barren as the area shown in the ad. Well, I don't think so. The environmentalists will come to champion all the lizards, birds, rats, spiders, cactus plants, and tumbling tumble weed species for sure. You can count on it. No such projects of any great scale will be allowed to be built.