On the unsustainability of wind power – noise pollution edition
03 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, law and economics Tags: noise pollution, wind power
The poor carbon footprint of wind and solar
01 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of climate change, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming Tags: bootleggers and baptists, global warming, green rent seeking, solar power, wind power
Paul Joskow pointed out that these costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency: wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night. Conventional power plants must be kept on standby. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match.
HT: The Economist via Sinclair Davidson
W. S. Jevons (1865) on Wind power — MasterResource
20 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in energy economics Tags: W. S. Jevons, wind power
1) wind power is not new.
2) wind power is intermittent and unsuitable for modern work:
The first great requisite of motive power is, that it shall be wholly at our command, to be exerted when, and where, and in what degree we desire. The wind, for instance, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear (p. 122).
3) wind power is land constrained:
No possible concentration of windmills … would supply the force required in large factories or iron works. An ordinary windmill has the power of about thirty-four men, or at most seven horses. Many ordinary factories would therefore require ten windmills to drive them, and the great Dowlais Ironworks, employing a total engine power of 7,308 horses, would require no less than 1,000 large windmills! (p. 123)
4) wind power for transportation did not work:
Richard Lovell Edgeworth spent forty years’ labour in trying to bring wind carriages into use. But no ingenuity could prevent [wind carriages] from being uncertain; and their rapidity with a strong breeze was such, that … ‘they seemed to fly, rather than roll along the ground.’ Such rapidity not under full control must be in the highest degree dangerous (p. 126).
via W. S. Jevons (1865) on Windpower (Memo to Obama, Part I) — MasterResource.
Warren Buffett: I Build Wind Turbines To Lower My Taxes
22 May 2014 Leave a comment
in entrepreneurship, environmental economics, taxation Tags: bootleggers and baptists, rentseeking, wind power
“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” Buffett told an audience in Omaha, Nebraska this weekend. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
Buffett has invested billions into wind power to get federal subsidies.
via Warren Buffett: I Build Wind Turbines To Lower My Taxes | The Daily Caller.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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