Ron Lehr of the American Wind Energy Association agrees, AWEA, there has got to be some movement on the National level by the Federal Government, if we are really going to embrace the change necessary to move our country forward quickly.
Here is the interview:
If you put a 'V' on the country with the bottom of the V at Texas, all those plains states have enormous wind resources. If we can get transmission lines to the coast where the people live, we could put our entire auto fleet on wind generated electricity through these plug in hybrids. Question - why isn't this happening? A- People think "well, why doesn't the market just take care of this?"We don't have a free market in the energy sector. There is no aspect in energy that is near a free market. We subsidize the oil, coil and gas industry through our tax dollars. The nuclear industry is subsidized by the Price-Anderson Act (which subsidizes all clean up costs over $900 million dollars) without which the Nuclear industry could not insure itself and therefore, could not exist, so that is clearly a tax subsidy. (the only challenge to the Price Anderson Act was in my home state of NC, which went before the Supreme court and lost in the Duke Power vs. Environmental Study Group decision.)
In 1992, the Congress approved a subsidy for wind and other renewable energy, the Production Tax Credit, which equalizes the tax incentives that other energy industries get. Since then, the Production Tax Credit has gone out of existence 3 times. All of the other subsidies for the fossil industries are fixed in the tax code, they are all permanent. They must think we are stupid in Washington. We've got permanent subsidies for the things we don't want, and inconsistent subsidies for the things we do want. They need to hear from people about this. One way is to go to AWEA.org, and get on the action alert to fix this Production Tax Credit situation.Indeed, the 'free market' has been controlled for the past 100 years through an oligarchy of a few companies all interconnected between oil, coal, gas, and of course, automobiles. These companies have gotten legislation for their tax subsidies from us, while stifling subsidies for renewable energy. We are now paying $4 a gallon, while the oil industry is still getting subsidized. Imagine, if our government was subsidizing Wind or Solar the way other governments are. For instance, it has been China, that is leading the way with their brand new MAGLEV Windmill Technology which actually uses wind power to generate a magnetic field to run the windmill blades with no moving machinery, or ball bearings, just a suspended magnetic field supporting the turbine. We need to go in a new direction to compete and to save the planet. It is true that the World's economy is shifting to renewables, and despite the 'smart people' saying it is a world that is going to be about getting control of the oil, I believe that the revitalization of America's job sector and restoring the middle class will be putting people to work in building electric light rails, solar panel factories and windmill factories. We can be the leader and put our eonconomy back on track:
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