End the Wind Farm Scam

A lot of places are getting scammed by "wind farm" advocates, giving The War Against Oil a bad name before it even gets started.

The reason is, simply, that governments are buying the lie that wind energy comes from farms.

Wind energy doesn’t come from farms. Wind energy comes from wind.

What is happening is that big companies are going to state governments desperate for alternative sources of energy and promising to harness the wind with giant, noisy windmills out in the countryside. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Maybe offshore. Because "the wind is more reliable out there."

Huh? The wind is everywhere. Hasn’t anyone gone into a big city and had their hat blown off because the air is pushed between the big buildings and thus has to rush through in order to get by? By contrast, many rural areas are downright calm — the only wind is what the local weather provides.

Any why must windmills be noisy and ginormous anyway? Who made that rule?  Oh, and when you are producing wind energy hundreds of miles away, for the grid, you’re losing half of it, in the grid, as it’s being transported to market.

Sheesh.

There are already plenty of people making very good, very simple windmills which can be easily installed in your front yard or on your roof, like this from Greenwindmill.com.

Not only are these not eyesores (well, some of them — I went to Rice and I’m not sure about the one to the left) they can be downright attractive.

The problem is that, with current technology, they’re not very efficient. They don’t draw much power from each mph of wind. As a result they’re best adapted to point sources, like powering birdbaths and pumping water.

So if governments want to help here’s what I propose. A contest. Something on the order of the X Prize contest won by Bert Rutan a few years ago.

You set out a design goal for an advanced urban windmill.  It has to have a certain efficiency, and it has to draw a certain amount of power. It has to be simple to install, including a connection to a home electrical system.

You get local businesses to pony up the prize, and then you add say, $1 million  from the state government — a fraction of what Ohio is now paying to subsidize individual "wind farms."

The money goes to help the winner build a plant to make these windmills in the jurisdiction in question. The money stays in state, in other words.

Every house can have a windmill. Every business can have a windmill. Every roof can have a windmill. If that windmill is affordable, if that windmill delivers power efficiently, if that windmill pays for itself.

But it will take some ingenuity to get there, and that’s all we need to be stimulating.