As usual, the mainstream media is losing its collective mind over the idea of taxing solar and wind power, due to a provision included in the thousand pages of the Big, Beautiful Bill. [emphasis, links added]
The important thing here is that the pundits whining about it clearly don’t understand what energy means in the context of public policy. We must begin by remembering that “energy” can mean many things, depending on the issue at hand.
If you ask an electrical engineer what “energy” is, he may specifically describe the voltage itself and how it travels, but not go further. But in a public policy discussion like this, the voltage is only a tiny slice of a much bigger pie.
How is the fuel converted into power? How is it stored? How is it transmitted? How much land, machinery, personnel, and security does the process need? How convenient is it for the users who need it? How much energy is lost in bridging that distance?
Sunlight is free; usable solar power is not.
Wind is free; usable wind power is not.
In public policy, therefore, the cost of the fuel is only the very beginning of the conversation. Coal, oil, natural gas, sunlight, and wind are the fuels.
But what does society have to do to convert those raw materials — those very different types of fuel — into power on the electric grid that you and I can tap into to power our lights, our air conditioning, our refrigerators, and our laptop computers?
Coal, oil, and natural gas are not free coming out of the ground, but they are pretty darned close. By contrast, yes, wind and sunlight are free; coal, oil, and natural gas are almost free. But there isn’t really much of a difference in cost between the two groups, at the source.
The relevant difference is this:
Coal, oil, and natural gas are all relatively cheap to convert into usable energy on a grand scale.
Power plants that use oil, coal, and natural gas are all designed to be incredibly efficient for powering an electric grid or for powering vehicles and other engines. The bigger the capacity of the plant, the more efficient it is.
Solar and wind are much more complex. These massive “wind farms” and “solar farms” — huge fields of plastic panels and monstrous towers — take up enormous amounts of the world’s most precious single resource: land.
Solar and wind generation require far more infrastructure and real estate per unit of energy produced and are infinitely more variable due to weather fluctuations; both have greater costs and much greater risks of failure than traditional energy sources (coal, oil, and gas).
Plucking an individual tax clause out of a big bill to analyze is always a bit of a challenge, until you know all the context around the program.
But we know this much: there are far more solar energy and wind energy dependencies in the American energy footprint today than ever before, putting lives and business at risk, and these two sources are devouring ever more precious land that the country simply cannot afford to spare.
The unpredictability of such a solar- and wind-dependent grid is already causing almost incalculable problems — such as rolling blackouts and other frequent outages that result in destroyed food at restaurants and grocery stores, manufacturing downtime when factories are without power, lost sales as retailers must shut their stores, lost lives as hospitals or nursing homes can no longer care for their patients.
And these problems will only increase as our dependence on solar and wind increases.
America’s farming and ranching output is already suffering from this shortsighted switch, and that trend is set to continue dangerously into the future unless we take control of it now.
Good farmland — land that we desperately need for both farming and ranching — is being wasted on massive fields of cheap plastic solar panels (correction: ridiculously expensive, frustratingly fragile, plastic solar panels) and outrageously massive bird-killing wind turbines of concrete, steel, and plastic.
Much has been said about how this solar and wind equipment is unrecyclable, but nowhere near enough has been said about the permanence of these wind turbines.
At least when we finally realize that a solar farm was a stupid waste of prime farmland, we can rip out the plastic junk and plant seeds again.
But once you’ve sunk a hundred concrete and steel wind towers into huge reinforced concrete footings twenty or thirty feet in diameter and just as deep (or even deeper), that land use is permanent.
After decommissioning the wind turbines, you’re never going to be able to plant anything there again.
[We’re learning this week that some congresspeople are acknowledging the costs and are courageously arguing that we should reduce the desirability of these particularly destructive projects by raising taxes on them]; that is a perfectly legitimate case worth arguing, and it deserves a place in the national debate.
Between our failing schools and failing press, our compromised political lobbies and Chinese influence, and our thoroughly warped system of rewarding bad ideas with tax credits, we have spent a generation unquestioningly convincing the American public that solar and wind power are the wave of the future, without so much as pretending to address their massive problems with environmental destruction, permanently wasteful misuse of fertile agricultural land, shockingly high cost per gigawatt, and propensity for mechanical failure.
Instead of being horrified that some in Congress want us to pay attention to the downsides of solar and wind power, we should be grateful that somebody in Washington dared to bring it up.
This is a debate that Western civilization desperately needs — the sooner the better.
Read rest at American Thinker
