Friday, January 23, 2015

Cape Wind - Just A Bunch Of Hot Air

Cape Wind, a proposed wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts Cape Cod in Nantucket Sound, is out of business before it even got started.  After wasting millions of tax payer dollars in federal subsidies on this green technology, Cape Wind failed to get financing and begin construction by December 31, 2014, a critical deadline date.  This caused the two primary utilities, NSTAR and National Grid that had committed to buy 77.5% of the electricity generated by Cape Wind to pull out of the deal.  This all fell apart because Cape Wind could not find any other buyers for its energy at the inflated prices necessary to support the project. 

And, why would any other utilities sign up when they can power their power plants with relatively cheap natural gas, nuclear, or coal.  To do otherwise, would cause dramatic increases in the cost of energy for their rate payers, which would be pretty indefensible and stupid.  It is obvious that green technology today is just not very cost effective.  There needs to be far more research and development on wind and solar to make it economically feasible.  It may be the energy of the future; but it is certainly not the energy of today. 

In the meantime, there should be additional research and development to make oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy cheaper, safer and more abundant because we have lots of these sources of energy.  This is just common sense.  It makes no sense to artificially raise the cost of energy, which would lower the standard of living for Americans and all other peoples of the world.  All this talk about climate change is exaggerated.  If it has gotten hotter, it is by tenths of a percentage.  Global Warming, if it does exist, is probably just a normal climatic cycle.   There have been hotter and cooler climate periods, over millions of years in world history, long before we had carbon emissions.

But even assuming that carbon emissions are impacting climate, nuclear energy emits no carbon.  Natural gas is pretty clean.  And, oil and coal can be made cleaner by use of scrubbers, catalytic converters etc.  We can't ignore existing energy sources if we are to raise the standard of living for the poor and middle class around the world.  Making energy more expensive, particularly by taxing it, is just another Socialist ploy to raise more taxes to make government bigger.  Let's at least call it what it is; just another Socialist Tax and Spend Big Government Scheme.     

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