As usual, mainstream media lost collective thoughts by the idea of taxing solar and wind energy, due to the provisions contained on the Thousand Pages of the Big and Beautiful Act. [emphasis, links added]
What is important here is that experts’ complaints about it clearly do not understand what energy means in the context of public policy. First, we need to remember that “energy” can depend on the problem at hand.
If you ask the electrical engineer what “energy” is, he might specifically describe the voltage itself and how it travels, but can't go further. But in such public policy discussions, voltage is only a small part of the larger sect.
How does fuel convert into power? How to store? How does it transmit? How much land, machinery, personnel and safety is required for the process? How convenient is it for users who need it? How much energy is lost when bridging this distance?
Sunlight is free; the available solar energy is not.
Wind is free; wind power available is not.
Therefore, in public policy, the cost of fuel is only the beginning of the conversation. Coal, oil, natural gas, sunlight and wind are fuel.
But what does it take to convert these raw materials (these very different types of fuels) into raw materials that you and I can take advantage of, and can I use the lights to power our lights, air conditioners, refrigerators and our laptop computers?
Coal, oil and gas do not come out of the ground, but they are very close. By contrast, yes, the wind and sun are free. Coal, oil and gas are almost free. However, the costs between the two groups are not actually much different.
The relevant difference is:
Coal, oil and gas are all relatively cheap and can be converted to available energy on a large scale.
Power plants using oil, coal and gas are all designed to be very efficient in powering the grid or powering vehicles and other engines. The greater the capacity of a plant, the greater its efficiency.
The sun and wind are more complicated. These huge “wind farms” and “solar farms” (plastic panels and terrifying towers) occupy the world's most precious single resource: land.
The generation of solar and wind requires more infrastructure and real estate, energy generated per unit, and changes infinitely due to weather fluctuations. Both have greater costs and greater risk of failure than traditional energy sources (coal, oil and gas).
Extracting separate tax clauses from a big bill is always a little challenging until you know all the context of the program.
But we know this: There is much more solar and wind dependence in the U.S. energy footprint today than ever, putting life and business at risk, and these two sources swallowing precious lands that the country simply cannot afford.
This unpredictability of the sun and wind-dependent grid has caused almost immeasurable problems such as rolling power outages and other frequent power outages that can cause food to be destroyed by restaurants and grocery stores, manufacturing downtime when factories are out of power, retailers’ sales lose retailers, retailers’ sales are lost because retailers’ sales are not allowed to close their lives, and therefore cannot cause longer medical services as hospitals or raising patients.
These problems only increase as we rely on solar energy and wind.
Agricultural and ranch output in the United States has been plagued by this shortsighted switch, and this trend will continue into the future unless we control it now.
Good farmland – land where we desperately need agriculture and pastures – wasted a lot of fields on cheap plastic solar panels (correction: expensive, frustratingly fragile, plastic solar panels) and a huge killer on the huge bird-killing wind turbines of concrete, steel and plastic.
There are many statements about how this solar and wind cannot be cleaned, but there is no sufficient statement about the durability of these wind turbines.
At least when we finally realize that solar farms are a stupid waste of major farmland, we can tear off the plastic waste again and plant seeds again.
But once you sink a hundred concrete and steel wind towers into a huge reinforced concrete foundation with a diameter of twenty or thirty feet, deeper (or even deeper) land use is permanent.
After you retire your wind turbine, you will never be able to grow anything 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];This is a completely legal 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 prosperity for mechanical failure.
We don’t think that some people in Congress want us to pay attention to the drawbacks of solar and wind power, but rather thank someone in Washington for daring to raise this.
This is a debate that Western civilization urgently needs – the sooner the better.
Reading break in the American Thinker
