It must be on its way out! Wind power will alway be hugely more costly because you have to duplicate wind generators with conventional generators for the times when the wind is not blowing. Some excerpts:
"With every turn of the giant blades of the 136 windmills here on the edge of a mesa, the stiff desert breeze is replacing expensive natural gas or other fuel that would have been burned in a power plant somewhere else. Wind energy makes up a small fraction of electric generation in this country, but the rising price of natural gas has made wind look like a bargain; in some cases, it is cheaper to build a wind turbine and let existing natural gas generators stand idle. Giant, modern wind farms like the New Mexico Wind Energy Center here may become more common if prices continue to rise.
The center, 150 miles east of Albuquerque, opened in the summer of 2003 and is one of the largest in the country. The power is bought by the state's largest utility, Public Service of New Mexico, and provides about 4 percent of that company's electricity over the course of a year. In March, when demand is low and winds are usually strong, the project generates 10 percent of the electricity the company supplies. The state has established a goal of using 10 percent renewable energy by 2011. The governor, Bill Richardson, a former secretary of energy, has said that New Mexico could become "the Saudi Arabia of renewables."
Across the country, the increase in gas prices has made a fundamental difference in the purchasing decisions of utility companies, said Michael A. O'Sullivan, senior vice president of FPL Energy, which owns and operates the New Mexico center. "Gas prices helped get - pardon the pun - the wind at our backs," he said in a telephone interview from the company headquarters in Juno Beach, Fla. At $6 per million B.T.U.'s, the standard unit in which gas prices are quoted, the fuel needed to produce a kilowatt-hour costs more than 5 cents at an inefficient gas plant, and more than 4 cents at the most efficient plants.
Last fall, Congress restored the Production Tax Credit, worth 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour after taxes, for wind energy projects completed by the end of 2005. Counting that credit, Mr. O'Sullivan said, his company sells wind energy for 3 to 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. The tax credit and steeper natural gas prices are driving the increased interest in wind energy.
But there are problems, even supporters say. "One of the things the wind folks do not talk about is when the wind blows," said George E. Kehler, manger of alternative and renewable energy at Dow Chemical. West Texas, for example, is notoriously windy, but mostly at night and in the winter, when the electric market is glutted with cheap power from coal and nuclear plants. Peak electric load, and peak use of gas in electricity generators, occurs in summer, during the day.
But most of the year the wind is not blowing nearly hard enough to make 206 megawatts. Mr. Brown said his company was not certain how much more heavily it could depend on wind energy without the threat of blackouts. The variability was obvious here on Thursday morning, with wind that looked to be suitable for kite flying, but which the center's employees said was weak. A control room display showed the wind blowing at 5.5 meters a second (about 12 miles an hour) and the "swooshing" from the 110-foot-long blades was slow, turning at about 16 revolutions a minute instead of the optimum 20. The plant was producing only about 25 megawatts, or one-eighth of its capacity.
More here
A GREENIE NEWS ORGANIZATION
The Associated Press has recently run two global warming stories by AP Special Correspondent Charles P. Hanley that misrepresent objective facts about climate, apparently for the purpose of leading readers to believe that human activities are causing the planet to warm significantly.
The AP published the same faulty information in another Hanley article nearly a year ago.... The re-publication of information the AP should know to be faulty falls on the heels of another grossly misleading AP story about a global warming report entitled "Meeting the Climate Challenge." Readers of the AP story about the report would likely conclude the report was issued by scientific research organizations - but the sponsors were liberal activist groups.
The New York Times and CBS News once were considered beyond the reach of public criticism. They are no more. Wire services such as the Associated Press may be less obviously vulnerable because its reporters are less visible personalities while its work product tends to be presented in a low-key manner. Nonetheless, the AP is hugely influential while the accuracy of its reporting is questionable at best. If this volatile mix continues, increased scrutiny is inevitable.
The most recent Haney stories (for examples, see "Glaciers Shrinking in a Warming World," Washington Post, January 29, 2005, and "Antarctica's Ice Seems to be Safe, at Least for Now," USA Today, February 7, 2005) contain the following:
"Temperatures globally rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, most of that attributed by scientific consensus to the accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other warming "greenhouse gases," mostly from fossil fuel-burning."
and
"The warming will continue as long as "greenhouse gases," primarily carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, accumulate in the atmosphere, say the U.N. panel and other authoritative scientific organizations."
These sentences are fairly transparent attempts to convince the reader that the global warming hypothesis is true. They go beyond editorializing to provable inaccuracy, however:
Half or more of 20th century global warming occurred in the first few decades of that century, before the widespread burning of fossil fuels (and before 82 percent of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide observed in the 20th century).
The primary greenhouse gas is water vapor, not carbon dioxide.
Most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not come from the burning of fossil fuels. Only about 14 percent of it does.
On the second matter, the AP article on the report "Meeting the Climate Challenge," the AP began its story:
"Global warming is approaching the critical point of no return, after which widespread drought, crop failure and rising sea-levels would be irreversible, an international climate change task force warned Monday.
The report, "Meeting the Climate Challenge," called on the G-8 leading industrial nations to cut carbon emissions, double their research spending on green technology and work with India and China to build on the Kyoto Protocol.
"An ecological time-bomb is ticking away," said Stephen Byers, who co-chaired the task force with U.S. Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, and is a close confidant of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "World leaders need to recognize that climate change is the single most important long term issue that the planet faces."
The independent report, by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Center for American Progress in the United States and The Australia Institute, is timed to coincide with Blair's commitment to advance international climate change policy during Britain's G-8 presidency...
...According to the report, urgent action is needed to stop the global average temperature rising by 2 degrees Celsius above the level in 1750 -- the approximate start of the Industrial Revolution when mankind first started significantly polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
Beyond a 2 degrees rise, "the risks to human societies and ecosystems grow significantly" the report said, adding there would be a risk of "abrupt, accelerated, or runaway climate change."
It warned of "climatic tipping points" such as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting and the Gulf Stream shutting down.
No accurate temperature readings were available for 1750, the report said, but since 1860, global average temperature had risen by 0.8 percent to 15 degrees Celsius.
The two degrees rise could be avoided by keeping the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 400 parts per million (ppm). Current concentrations of 379 ppm "are likely to rise above 400 ppm in coming decades and could rise far higher under a business-as-usual scenario," the report warned...."
Readers could be forgiven for believing the three organizations sponsoring the report are independent, objective scientific research organizations. Certainly nothing in the AP's text tells anyone not already familiar with the groups that they are anything but objective:
The Center for American Progress, in its "What We're About" section on its website, gives one of its four reasons to exist as "responding effectively and rapidly to conservative proposals and rhetoric with a thoughtful critique and clear alternatives." The other three cited reasons are various methods of promoting liberal political ideology.
A publication by The Australia Institute openly revealed that the report's purpose was to influence governmental action, not to provide new scientific information about the climate. Other Australia Institute publications, including press materials about the report, also make this clear. Readers of the AP story, however, are never told this.
Britain's Institute for Public Policy Research says starkly at the top left of its Internet home page "IPPR is the UK's leading progressive think tank." It also says of itself, "IPPR was formed... to act as a dynamic, independent catalyst for progressive thinking on the centre-left... [IPPR's] emergence was crucial in providing an alternative space to rival the thinking of free-market think-tanks."
The three left-of-center organizations were more open about their agenda than the AP was on their behalf.
Source
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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