The Obama administration says that wind can provide more than one-third of the nation’s electricity by 2050 — up from just 4.5 percent of the electrical supply today.
The Department of Energy released a report Thursday, “Wind Vision: A New Era for Wind Power in the United States.” The report says its conclusion was reached, “through analysis of scenarios of wind power supplying 10 percent of national end-use electricity demand by 2020, 20 percent by 2030, and 35 percent by 2050.”
(AP Photo/David Mercer)
But reaching such a high level could be a major engineering difficulty considering wind is not a reliable energy source, said William Yeatman a senior fellow for environmental policy and energy markets at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“Wind power can only be used when the wind blows. It’s an overstatement to call wind power useless but it’s not an overstatement to say it can’t really be a competitive energy source with fossil fuels,” Yeoman told TheBlaze. “Say a facility needs power for a certain time because it’s going to be really hot between 4 and 6 p.m. You can rely on natural gas or nuclear power in that case.”
“You generally need to have the same amount of power coming into the grid as you have going out,” Yeatman continued. “It becomes an engineering difficulty to have more than 12 percent of the grid relying on wind energy, because sometimes you have a heavy wind. Sometimes it’s not blowing at all. To talk about 35 percent is a pipe dream not based on the technology we have.”
The Obama administration fiscal year 2016 budget proposal calls for $25 billion in clean energy tax incentives.
“Today, average wind energy costs nationally are approaching cost-competitive levels,” the White House asserts in a news release heralding the Energy Department’s findings. “Backed by stable policies including the production tax credit and the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, costs will continue to drop as the industry scales up and innovates.”
The primary way of funding wind projects will be through the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, Yeatman said. Like the production tax credit, the cost to taxpayers depends on how many companies seek the government assistance over the next fiscal year. Another avenue for funding is the Environmental Protection Agency regulations that force the market to use alternative energy sources such as wind.
“This is an administration and a political party that has subsidized and mandated green energy like wind and is now using government resources to make the case for the taxpayer giveaways,” Yeatman said.
The report projects by 2050, wind power production will expand to all 50 states from the current 39 states.
President Barack Obama and other administration officials have frequently talked about the potential for “green jobs.” The report projects, “approximately 600,000 wind related jobs spread across the nation.”
The report says the conclusions were reached by 250 experts from the wind industry, the electric power industry, environmental groups, state and federal governmental agencies and research institutions.
Still, most of the conclusions reflect the existing policy of the Obama administration, which has been to subsidize wind power, solar power and other green energy.
The further predicted wind power could further reduce global carbon emissions by one-third by 2050, or equivalent to taking 20 million cars off the road. Meanwhile, the report projects $108 billion in savings from health care costs and economic damages.
