Wind Power Won’t Cool Down The Planet

The wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the claim that it will provide major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. There’s just one problem: It’s not true. A slew of recent studies show that wind-generated electricity likely won’t result in any reduction in carbon emissions – or that they’ll be so small as to be almost meaningless, says Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, recently published his fourth book, “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.”

Because wind blows intermittently, electric utilities must either keep their conventional power plants running all the time to make sure the lights don’t go dark, or continually ramp up and down the output from conventional coal- or gas-fired generators (called “cycling”). But coal-fired and gas-fired generators are designed to run continuously, and if they don’t, fuel consumption and emissions generally increase. Recent research strongly suggests how this problem defeats the alleged carbon-reducing virtues of wind power, says Bryce.

In April, Bentek Energy, a Colorado-based energy analytics firm, looked at power plant records in Colorado and Texas. (It was commissioned by the Independent Petroleum Association of the Mountain States.) Bentek concluded that despite huge investments, wind-generated electricity “has had minimal, if any, impact on carbon dioxide” emissions: