Some time ago I commented on the bogus nature of the rush towards wind power by means of constructing more and more unsightly eyesore wind mills. A observant reader noted that there is some irony in my anti-windmill comments, being that my ancestry is from a country that built its very existence and vast prosperity, 400 years ago, on wind mill technology of the day. Well they did, but they were wise enough to switch to steam power as soon as it became available due its consistency and reliability.
Although, being Dutch, they preserved a number of those old wind mills for the purpose of harvesting millions of tourist dollars. I could only hope that history will repeat itself and a couple of the behemoth windmill monstrosities that exist today will be preserved soon as monuments to human folly and a waste of taxpayer dollars. But I digress.
Perhaps political-correctness with wind power has reached new heights of absurdity with recent TV and print advertising by the City of Calgary. Those advertisements trumpet the goal of the city in becoming the first in Canada to obtain all its public power requirements from sustainable wind power.
City politicians and senior bureaucrats were no doubt congratulating each other for such an environmentally brilliant achievement. The truth be known the only thing they achieved was bamboozling the city taxpayer by paying a premium for green power they don’t get and insulting the livelihoods of thousands of tax-paying citizens.
I have noted before that most wind power produced in southern Alberta is sold to the BC grid at a discount because our own grid can’t handle the wide fluctuations in electrical supply produced by wind mills. Besides, windmills produce only 30 per cent of the time. Both of those factors would see that almost zero wind power would actually reach the city of Calgary for which it pays a premium. No wonder utilities and commercial wind power companies are falling over themselves selling wind power at a premium to gullible consumers. You get to overcharge for a commodity that you do not have to deliver. In fact, you get to substitute much cheaper coal-fired electricity. What a boondoggle and it’s perfectly legal.
The real travesty with the city of Calgary wind power boondoggle is this - I would suspect that wind mills provide almost zero to the city’s tax base. Wind mills aren’t built in Calgary, most are manufactured in faraway China, Denmark and Germany - no taxes of any kind from those places. Those big wind mill farms are all located in the south of the province, so there are no property taxes to be gleaned for Calgary. Yet the city harvests millions of tax dollars from an industry that could produce electricity much cheaper and much more reliable than wind power - but it’s an industry the city disdains and dishonors with its untruthful advertising.
Thousands of Calgary citizens and businesses derive their living from the natural gas industry. Those same citizens and businesses pay countless millions of dollars of taxes of every kind, - a considerable chunk of which ends up in the coffers of the city of Calgary. Without batting an eye, Calgary city politicians and bureaucrats turn around and spend those hard earned dollars from the natural gas industry on expensive wind power that they actually do not receive. Did I mention that those tax dollars are also spent subsidizing the capital expenditure of wind mill farm construction?
So let’s see - our genius city politicians, instead of supporting a local industry that pays taxes and supplies cheap reliable electricity, would rather use tax dollars to support foreign manufacturers that don’t pay city taxes and support a wind power industry that produces electricity that is expensive and unreliable for which the city pays a premium.
What an insult to the thousands of tax payers who derive a living from the natural gas industry. You would think the city would support its own citizens first rather than use their tax dollars against them on bogus green power schemes.
But there is some irony to all of this and it’s all part of the wind power madness. The more wind power that comes on stream, the more natural gas fired electrical plants we need. That’s because wind power is so unreliable that these plants are needed for backup when wind power dies. It’s probably why utility companies aren’t crying too much about wind mill subsidization - they have a vested interest in more wind power - in fact, in many cases they are partners or owners in those ventures. At the end of the day, it would seem the power users get screwed either way. Think about that as you pass by those environmentally sustainable politically-correct wind mills.