One Step Forward, One Step Back
The other day I was happy to see lefty Kevin Drum pointing out the obvious problems with subsidizing Edit Post "¹ Coyote Blog "” WordPressethanol. This is a step forward, when smart people on both sides of the aisle can agree that a certain approach is dumb. Of course, given the incentives in government, that doesn't mean that ethanol subsidies will actually stop.
So we make some progress on ethanol, but just replace it without another absurdly dumb subsidized energy technology, in this case wind. Wind is not even close to being ready for grid service, and given the hot backup power one needs to cover its unpredictability, it does about zero to reduce CO2 emissions. A series of studies have shown that it has done nothing to reduce fossil fuel consumption in either Germany or Denmark. And the whole green jobs thing is even more absurd -- it makes no sense theoretically, as shifting private investment to less economically viable uses has never, ever created jobs -- and has been debunked in practice in both Denmark and Spain.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has bent over backwards to ignore the science and push wind, for no other reason I can figure out except to avoid admitting he was wrong when he campaigned on wind. This makes for a pretty depressing story, and, given there are more documents the Administration is resisting releasing under FOIA, probably more ugly news to follow.
Postscript: One way you could use wind is with some kind of storage system, of which I can think of two. The first is to use wind to pmp water up hill into a reservoir where the potential energy could later be harvested as hydroelectric power. The other is to use the wind power to make hydrogen from water. You need some sort of process that can be stopped and started on short notice.
