Chairman’s Message: "Green Energy" Becoming a Synonym for Questionable Insider Deals

News accounts are spotlighting the failure of a solar panel company that has filed for bankruptcy, despite receiving a half-billion dollar government-backed loan from the Obama Administration. This past Thursday FBI agents raided the company's offices. Congressional investigators are looking into the crony capitalism connection between the White House and the decision to give Solyndra $535 million in loans. One of the company's top investors was a major fundraiser for Obama and a frequent White House visitor. Last year Obama visited Solyndra, where he proclaimed that the company represented America's energy future.

Operating with the same "green energy" playbook, Maryland Governor O'Malley has tried his own crony capitalism deal. Last spring O'Malley asked lawmakers to support a rise in almost every state resident's electric bill for the next 20 years in order to subsidize private offshore wind power producers. He would have added a surcharge on Maryland electric consumer bills to subsidize uneconomical wind power production. Analysts testified that it would have cost in excess of $84 per year per consumer or over $3 billion over time. The key advocate for the scheme was the Governor's former chief of staff, Michael Enright, now working for a company called Beuwulf Energy. Fortunately, the legislature turned the governor down, in part because the Washington Post began questioning the O'Malley - Enright connection.

Manhattan Institute energy expert Robert Bryce punctures the hype over wind energy. He observes that the wind-energy lobby has captured huge subsidies and mandates. Yet when power demand is highest, wind energy's output is generally low.

For example, last month, Texans were consuming record-breaking quantities of electricity. So much so, that the state's grid operator warned of rolling blackouts if customers didn't reduce consumption.

Texas has 10,135 megawatts of installed wind-generation capacity, nearly three times as much as any other state. But during three sweltering days, when the state set new records for electricity demand, the state's vast herd of turbines were unable to produce any serious amount of power.

Consider the afternoon of August 2, when demand was peaking, output from the state's wind turbines could provide only about 2.2% of all power. This is in despite of the fact that the installed capacity of Texas's wind turbines theoretically equals nearly 15% of peak demand. Last year when demand also set records, wind energy contributed less than 2%.

The wind-energy sector, through the $0.022 per-kilowatt-hour production tax credit, gets subsidies of about $6.40 per million Btu of energy produced-an amount that, according to the Energy Information Administration, is about 200 times the subsidy received by the oil and gas sector. According to the Energy Information Administration, the wind energy sector got more federal subsidies in 2010 than any other energy sector other than biofuels. Wind energy got a total of $4.986 billion in subsidies, or nearly twice as much as was given to the oil and gas sector, which got $2.82 billion. Still wind-energy lobbyists like Enright and Beuwulf Energy are calling for more.

Wind's environmental benefits have been exaggerated. Compared with natural gas-fired power generation, the carbon dioxide reduction from wind energy was just 0.3 tons of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour.

According to the Congressional Research Service's 2010 report, Displacing Coal with Generation from Existing Natural-gas-fired power Plants, " if natural-gas combined-cycle plants utilization were to be doubled from 42 percent capacity factor to 85 percent, then the amount of power generated would displace 19 percent of the CO2 emissions attributed to coal-fired electricity generation." Another of the Governor and President's justifications for wind power has been a desire to produce so-called "green-tech" jobs. Their claims were rebutted by recent research from the Brooking Institute showing that between 2003 and 2010, these jobs increased at a slower rate than the economy as a whole. http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2011/0713_clean_economy.aspx "

Green Energy," solar, biofuels and wind power, is becoming a synonym for cozy insider deals between liberal Democrats and their favored supporters to have taxpayers pay for projects that could never receive investor funding in the marketplace.

Mark Uncapher
Montgomery County Republican Chairman