Letter: Beware half-baked energy schemes
Friday, May 4, 2012
Imagine that fans of health food pass a law requiring taxpayers to subsidize private companies to supply your family with hot meals each month, at a time of the companies’ choosing. They could arrive at your door at 3 a.m. with a month’s supply of hot meals, and if you could not eat all those meals, you would still have to pay for them.
Absurd? Of course, but that is the very position we are in with regard to suppliers of wind energy who expect to be paid for their power whether or not anyone wants it, needs it or can use it. The Bonneville Power Administration, owned and paid for by taxpayers, is expected to curtail production so we have the privilege of paying more for wind energy that we already pay to subsidize. This is the typical insanity we produce when people vote for feel-good programs they don’t understand.
There’s nothing more useless than subsidized products we can’t use. Wind energy producers need to figure out a way of storing their energy so they can supply it when needed rather than at the whim of nature, and we need to wise up enough to quit mandating half-baked schemes.
Richard Willerton
VANCOUVER
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