As with ethanol, familiarity is likely to breed contempt for wind - Let's see: a heavily subsidized energy source that needs a mandate to get it over the top. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same situation we were in with corn ethanol a few years ago. Through 2005, ethanol's high cost, among other problems, were such that even a 51 cent per gallon tax credit and other giveaways couldn't enable it to capture much more than 2 percent of the motor-fuel market.
Last year was one of record oil and gasoline prices. Yet ethanol still added to the overall burden on the driving public. In addition, the diversion of corn from food to fuel use raised the price not only of corn itself but of related items such as corn-fed meat and dairy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that up to 15 percent of food price increases from April 2007 to April 2008 were because of the ethanol mandate.
That costly double whammy - higher costs to drive to the supermarket and higher prices once you're there - really soured consumers on the ethanol mandate. It also contributed to global food-price inflation and hardships in the developing world, eroding the already shaky moral high ground that ethanol had held. Surprisingly, many environmental activists piled on, arguing that the "green" benefits of ethanol were overstated and that this once-favored alternative actually contributes to global warming.
Congress has yet to correct its ethanol mistake. The mandated levels rise to 10.5 billion gallons this year and 12 billion in 2010, so the difficulties will only intensify.
Are lawmakers about to make the same mistake with wind energy? As with ethanol, wind is too expensive to expand without a lot of help. Right now, its added cost is an unnoticeable speck on people's electric bills. A hefty mandate would change that.
One often overlooked factor is wind's unreliability. Wind can stop blowing at any time, and it often does during hot summer days when electricity demand peaks. Because people expect electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, additional wind power would need to be backed up with additional conventional sources ready to carry the full load at any time - further raising costs and undercutting the rationale for this alternative.
There's also reason to expect that wind's green status will evaporate. For one thing, the pending proposals would require tens of millions of acres of new wind farms, much of it on land now in its natural state. Environmentalists already object to certain wind-farm sites and transmission-line routes, and their complaints would multiply greatly if wind power expanded. Its claimed global-warming benefits also could come under attack.
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