THREAD: The Wind Production Tax Credit is a perverse policy that pays utilities to slow down or shut down reliable power plants whenever the wind blows. It is driving reliable power plants out of business, leading to higher costs and lower reliability.
1: Wind turbines cannot provide the reliable energy that our amazing electrical grid requires 24/7. That’s why every place in the world that uses unreliable wind energy depends 24/7 on massive amounts of reliable energy from coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear plants.
2: Because wind turbines are unreliable they can’t replace our reliable power plants, only duplicate or supplement them at tremendous cost. That’s why the more wind a grid uses the more expensive its electricity tends to be.
3: The only reason utilities buy unnecessary, wasteful wind turbines is government policies that force them to do so or reward them for doing so. “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them,” says Warren Buffett.
4: One of the worst wind favoritism policies is the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), which pays utilities to shut down or slow down reliable gas, coal, and nuclear power plants whenever the wind blows, driving many out of operation and threatening the grid’s future.
5: The perverse incentives of the wind PTC and other wind favoritism are not only making electricity more expensive but less reliable. That’s why grids around the US are already blacking out industrial customers, and Texas and the Northeast are warning of residential blackouts.
6: Congress needs to let the 28-year-old wind PTC expire, end all forms of energy favoritism, and let technologies compete on reliability and cost. That will reduce electricity prices, increase reliability, and increase innovation.
