Billionaire financier T. Boone Pickens’ campaign for government subsidies to wind power, advertised in a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal and subsequently in an op-ed piece in the same, seems erroneous in several respects.
Bad Policy
First, our reliance on imported oil is not a “crisis” unless we make it one. There are cheaper supplies of oil and its substitutes here in the United States, and the high prices we currently are paying would bring those supplies out of the ground and to consumers were it not for anti-energy policies preventing exploration and drilling. Those policies ought to be changed, rather than executing this elaborate and expensive build-around.
Second, we do not need a single “plan” to transition from oil to some other fuel or fuels. We need to allow millions, even billions, of consumers and producers to make their own plans, and the transition will occur naturally. I recommend Pickens find a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s classic essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” and apply it to the current situation.
Poor Option
Pickens’ plan is for taxpayers to make massive investments in wind power (which can’t compete with coal or even nuclear power) and power lines (because the wind often blows most in areas where people don’t want to live and work), in order to free up natural gas currently being used to generate electricity (much of that in new facilities built to comply with Clean Air standards, which I guess he thinks we should just discard), which can then be used to fuel cars and trucks (increasing the cost per vehicle by $3,500 to $6,000, reducing a vehicle’s range per tank of fuel by 50 percent or more, and posing new safety issues), all to reduce our reliance on oil.
Did you follow all that?
Far Better Alternatives
Call me stupid if you like, but why not build coal or nuclear plants instead of windmills? These plants can be built near the people they serve, at a fraction of the cost, on a fraction of the land, with nearly zero environmental impact, and without invoking eminent domain to kick people off their property.
We could then plug in our hybrid cars at night and cut our gasoline consumption by 70 or 80 percent without running natural gas lines to every gas station and turning our cars and trucks into mobile bombs.
I don’t know … it just seems simpler.
By now, everyone knows the limitations of windmills—vast areas of land have to be covered with these lumbering (and frequently malfunctioning) giants to generate an intermittent supply of energy that is a very small fraction of what a few coal or nuclear plants can produce.
Under Pickens’ plan, intermittency would still be a major problem, so we would still need conventional plants to provide base-load capacity for “spinning reserves.” Why not just have them produce as much of it as people find economical, as we do now?
Subsidy Hound
The real reason behind his scheme is very simple. Pickens is looking for subsidies—eminent domain to run the new transmission lines and build windmills on private land, subsidies to build new power lines, and production subsidies to windmill farm operators.
Adam Smith warned us more than two centuries ago, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, to look out for “the man of system,” who “is apt to be very wise in his own conceit” and imagines he can “arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard.”
Sorry, Mr. Pickens. We are not mere chess pieces, and America is not your chessboard.
Joseph Bast ([email protected]) is president of The Heartland Institute, coauthor of Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism (1994), and publisher of Environment & Climate News.
Joseph Bast is a Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute. He cofounded Heartland in 1984, serving as executive director then as president & CEO until January 2018. His research and writing focuses on climate change and energy policy.
