Who's behind it? - North Texas Wind Resistance Alliance

North Texas Wind Resistance Alliance
Promoting the Truth about Wind Energy

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Who's behind it?

Powerful corporate and financial interests

When you understand that wind energy does not work on a “utility-scale”, the next questions are “Why are they doing it?” and ultimately “Who is behind it?”

Simply put, it’s a corporate tax-avoidance scam, put in place by investment banking lobbyists, energy industry lobbyists, and the late Ken Lay and his Enron Wind subsidiary. Through manipulation in Congress and state legislatures, they have created a guaranteed high-return investment program, heavily subsidized by taxpayers and utility ratepayers, to benefit themselves at the expense of the public. They then market this scheme to the victimized public and gullible politicians as an environmentally-friendly "renewable energy" program, and have the "big" environmental groups that they support and sustain join in a chorus of approval.

This shameful tale is not unique. The corporate and financial interests promoting Wind Energy were helped in Congress by a "renewable energy" alliance with corn-state Senators, and their equally fraudulent, heavily-subsidized "ethanol" replacement for gasoline, but that's another story. See Taxpayers for Common Sense and Cornell Scientist Opposes Ethanol.

A little history

The first round of wind energy mal-investment occurred in 1981, with the enactment of financial incentives in Congress and in California. A mad scramble was on to get them built and installed - the Great California Wind Rush. In 1985 the incentives were withdrawn and the industry collapsed. Without the subsidies and incentives, wind energy was then, and is now, totally unworkable. In the interim more than 14,000 wind turbines, small by current standards, had been built, in Altamont Pass north of Livermore, San Gorgonio Pass near Palm Springs, and Tehachapi Pass north of LA. With the withdrawal of incentives, many turbines were quickly abandoned. They still stand today, rusted and broken, their developers long since gone or bankrupted, with no one to take them down. They are an unsightly industrial junk-yard, a horrible blight on the landscape, a monument to failed public policy.

Along comes ENRON

The second round began in the late 1990’s, when the politically connected Ken Lay and the financial engineers figured they could do it again, only on a national scale. They disguised it as an environmentally-friendly “renewable energy” project, and packaged it in with their “electricity deregulation” lobbying and political maneuvering efforts. They got laws passed at both the state and federal levels to (1) permit them to tie onto the grid; (2) require utilities to buy the unreliable and unpredictable electricity under “Renewable Portfolio Standards”; (3) allow them to sell “Renewable Energy Certificates” separate and apart from the electricity; (4) provide them with an inflation-adjusted 10-year “Production Tax Credit” that now equals $.019/kWh; and (5) allow tax write-off of the 20-year project cost using an accelerated 5-year double-declining-balance method (40% per year). The subsidies are costing taxpayers and utility ratepayers more than $1 billion per year.

Enron was touted prior to exposure of its fraud and bankruptcy as “the world’s only fully-integrated wind power company”. But wind energy didn’t die with Enron. It lives on, feeding off the subsidies. General Electric (GE) purchased Enron’s wind turbine manufacturing business, while Florida Power and Light (FPL) and others purchased Enron’s wind farm projects and adopted their business model. All now push for expanded tax credits. They succeeded last year in extending the federal production tax credit to projects starting-up through 2007, and in raising the “renewable energy" purchase requirement in Texas to over 5,000 mega-watts by 2015.

The Shift from Electrical Engineers to Investment Bankers

Electricity Deregulation and the manipulated embrace of Wind Energy have shifted the focus of our power system from "reliability" to "profitability", and shifted the management of our power system from electrical engineers to investment bankers and their lobbyists and politicians.

See "The Revolt of the Engineers", Today's Engineer, and other publications from the experienced, courageous John A. "Jack" Casazza and his Power Engineers Supporting Truth (http://www.pest-03.org).

Billions have been invested in useless wind turbines, while our national electricity infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate. How much damage can our economy sustain, as we waste our capital on the wind energy hoax, while destroying the electrical grid that powers our nation?

For a “who’s who” of the wind energy business go to the website of their association, AWEA, and see their Board of Directors, at http://www.awea.org/about/board_of_directors.html .