I was searching around the Roanoke Times for articles and I came across my letter to the editor, it was the "Pick of the Day" for Tuesday, Septeber 13th and I didn't know until now. I wrote it mainly because all of the articles I came across on the Poor Mountain wind farm seem to be really biased towards the proponents, even the wording of their news articles seems to demonize everyone who questions this proposal...
Check it out at: http://blogs.roanoke.com/roundtable/2011/09/tuesday-letters-pick-of-the-day-10/
Awe-inspiring Mountain Beauty
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Wind Blows...
This is an opinion article written for the NY Times about a Vermont wind farm that sounds very much like the one they want to put up on Poor Mountain; this guy's opinion pretty much mirrors mine in every way, so...
Erecting those turbines along more than three miles of ridgeline requires building roads — with segments of the ridgeline road itself nearly half as wide as one of Vermont’s interstate highways — in places where the travel lanes are now made by bear, moose, bobcat and deer.
It requires changing the profile of the ridgeline to provide access to cranes and service vehicles. This is being accomplished with approximately 700,000 pounds of explosives that will reduce parts of the mountaintops to rubble that will be used to build the access roads.
It also requires the clear-cutting on steep slopes of 134 acres of healthy forest, now ablaze in autumn colors. Studies have shown that clear-cutting can lead to an increase in erosion to high-quality headwater streams, robbing them of life and fouling the water for downstream residents, wild and human.
The electricity generated by this project will not appreciably reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions. Only 4 percent of those emissions now result from electricity generation. (Nearly half come from cars and trucks, and another third from the burning of heating oil.)
Wind doesn’t blow all the time, or at an optimum speed, so the actual output of the turbines — the “capacity factor” — is closer to about one-third of the rated capacity of 63 megawatts. At best, this project will produce enough electricity to power about 24,000 homes per year, according to the utility.
Still, wind does blow across Vermont’s ridgelines. The Vermont Public Interest Research Group, for instance, has suggested that wind power could provide as much as 25 percent of the state’s electricity needs, which would require turbines on 29 miles of ridgeline. Other wind advocates, notably David Blittersdorf, the chief executive of a wind and solar power company in Williston, Vt., has urged that wind turbines be placed along 200 miles of ridgeline in the state.
But it is those same Green Mountain ridgelines that attracted nearly 14 million visitors to Vermont in 2009, generating $1.4 billion in tourism spending. The mountains are integral to our identity as the Green Mountain State, and provide us with clean air and water and healthy wildlife populations.
Vermont’s proud history of leadership in developing innovative, effective environmental protection is being tossed aside. This project will set an ominous precedent by ripping apart a healthy, intact ecosystem in the guise of doing something about climate change. In return, Green Mountain Power will receive $44 million in federal production tax credits over 10 years.
Ironically, most of the state’s environmental groups have not taken a stand on this ecologically disastrous project. Apparently, they are unwilling to stand in the way of “green” energy development, no matter how much destruction it wreaks upon Vermont’s core asset: the landscape that has made us who we are.
The pursuit of large-scale, ridgeline wind power in Vermont represents a terrible error of vision and planning and a misunderstanding of what a responsible society must do to slow the warming of our planet. It also represents a profound failure to understand the value of our landscape to our souls and our economic future in Vermont.
The Not-So-Green Mountains
By STEVE E. WRIGHT
Published: September 28, 2011
This desecration, in the name of “green” energy, is taking place in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom on one of the largest tracts of private wild land in the state. Here and in other places — in Maine and off Cape Cod, for instance — the allure of wind power threatens to destroy environmentally sensitive landscapes.
Erecting those turbines along more than three miles of ridgeline requires building roads — with segments of the ridgeline road itself nearly half as wide as one of Vermont’s interstate highways — in places where the travel lanes are now made by bear, moose, bobcat and deer.
It requires changing the profile of the ridgeline to provide access to cranes and service vehicles. This is being accomplished with approximately 700,000 pounds of explosives that will reduce parts of the mountaintops to rubble that will be used to build the access roads.
It also requires the clear-cutting on steep slopes of 134 acres of healthy forest, now ablaze in autumn colors. Studies have shown that clear-cutting can lead to an increase in erosion to high-quality headwater streams, robbing them of life and fouling the water for downstream residents, wild and human.
The electricity generated by this project will not appreciably reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions. Only 4 percent of those emissions now result from electricity generation. (Nearly half come from cars and trucks, and another third from the burning of heating oil.)
Wind doesn’t blow all the time, or at an optimum speed, so the actual output of the turbines — the “capacity factor” — is closer to about one-third of the rated capacity of 63 megawatts. At best, this project will produce enough electricity to power about 24,000 homes per year, according to the utility.
Still, wind does blow across Vermont’s ridgelines. The Vermont Public Interest Research Group, for instance, has suggested that wind power could provide as much as 25 percent of the state’s electricity needs, which would require turbines on 29 miles of ridgeline. Other wind advocates, notably David Blittersdorf, the chief executive of a wind and solar power company in Williston, Vt., has urged that wind turbines be placed along 200 miles of ridgeline in the state.
But it is those same Green Mountain ridgelines that attracted nearly 14 million visitors to Vermont in 2009, generating $1.4 billion in tourism spending. The mountains are integral to our identity as the Green Mountain State, and provide us with clean air and water and healthy wildlife populations.
Vermont’s proud history of leadership in developing innovative, effective environmental protection is being tossed aside. This project will set an ominous precedent by ripping apart a healthy, intact ecosystem in the guise of doing something about climate change. In return, Green Mountain Power will receive $44 million in federal production tax credits over 10 years.
Ironically, most of the state’s environmental groups have not taken a stand on this ecologically disastrous project. Apparently, they are unwilling to stand in the way of “green” energy development, no matter how much destruction it wreaks upon Vermont’s core asset: the landscape that has made us who we are.
The pursuit of large-scale, ridgeline wind power in Vermont represents a terrible error of vision and planning and a misunderstanding of what a responsible society must do to slow the warming of our planet. It also represents a profound failure to understand the value of our landscape to our souls and our economic future in Vermont.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Wind Farm Scandal: More Cap and Trade Fun
I was nosing around the internet on my lunch hour, and found this well-researched article written by James Hall of NY on the Wind Power Wall Street scam... I wonder what these finance guys will think of next to destroy our environment and our bank accounts?
Industrial Wind and the Wall Street Cap and Trade Fraud
Industrial Wind and the Wall Street Cap and Trade Fraud
http://citizenpoweralliance.wordpress.co...ade-fraud/
Financial scandals are not new. Schemes to leverage risk and cheat the public are mainstays of the mad “Cap and Trade” stratagem, in the ongoing war, against genuine free enterprise. The latest ploy is the industrial wind swindle.
In the essay, Wall Street Reaps Big Bucks from the Wind, the strategy to defraud the public is explored. “The latest rage out of the boiler room sharks that hawk new equity issues touts alternative energy. The hype that is coming out of Wall Street resembles the internet band wagon before the bust . . . Goldman Sachs rushes to finance the offers with their expertise – using other peoples’ money . . . Understand from the outset, that producing useful energy is not the prime objective of wind projects.”
To illustrate this point the pending First Wind Holdings Inc. SEC S-1 and S-1A application for an IPO readily admits that producing electricity it is not necessary to be profitable.
Understanding the complexity of industrial wind can be a challenge. The derogative knock NIMBY, is meant to deceive and distract from the reality that an ill “Wall Street” wind blows behind the heretical doctrine of global warming.
Jon Boone PhD is a leading voice against industrial wind. WHY WIND WON’T WORK is a primer that dispels the myth that wind factories are a sensible solution to electric generation, much less a remedy for climate change.
“The hope for wind energy stems from a belief that it will offset significant carbon emissions as it substitutes for dirty burning coal plants. But what is the evidence for this? Any analysis examining this issue must account for (1) what happens as wind energy enters the grid, causing grid operators to turn off or back conventional generators in response (or hold back generators that might otherwise have been deployed if there were no wind energy), and (2) what happens as operators seek to integrate wind’s wild fluctuations.
Wind adds another layer of instability that must be smoothed out so that demand and supply are balanced precisely. Controllers respond to the wind influx by dialing back the generation from the operation of conventional units, much as they do when demand decreases. And as the level of wind energy flutters about the grid, rising and falling at random, rapidly responsive conventional generators are deployed to balance this ebb and flow. When wind energy disappears from the grid, it is as if demand has again increased, and more power is required from conventional sources to match it.”
In a significant analysis, Less For More: The Rube Goldberg Nature of Industrial Wind Development, Dr. Boone concludes:
“Wind energy, at industrial scales operating within the grid system as a whole, must be considered as only one of the reciprocals in a fuel mix; it must be entangled with conventional fuel to make it viable even as a sporadic fuel substitute. Wind energy simply cannot be loosed on the grid by itself. Grid stability requires that the fluctuations of wind be backed or compensated for immediately by conventional, reliable generation on a minute by minute basis—that is, generation from highly flexible, rapidly responsive thermal or hydro units.”
Since generating usable and reliable electricity is not the prime purpose for a wind developer, what impact can the ratepayer expect in their electric bill?
A succinct explanation on The True Cost of Electricity from Wind is Always Underestimated and its Value Always Overestimated, in the Science & Public Policy Institute, comes from this Glenn R. Schleede report. Mr. Schleede states:
“When initially proposed, wind energy advocates argued that tax breaks and subsidies were necessary to permit a relatively “new and developing technology” to gain a foothold in competition with other sources of energy for producing electricity. However, industry demands for continuation, expansion and extension of subsidies have made it clear that there are no longer any serious expectations that wind energy is competitive or that improvements in the technology will eventually make it competitive.
Instead, it appears that the only hope that wind energy would become economically competitive with traditional energy sources is if the cost of electricity from traditional sources were driven much higher – with all the adverse impacts on electric customers and local and national economies that result from high electricity prices.”
Just how much more will consumers pay in higher rates over the conventional methods of electric generation?
In the report, RENEWABLE ENERGY Not Cheap, Not “Green” by Robert L. Bradley Jr. in the Cato Policy Analysis No. 280, August 27, 1997 wrote, “ratepayers typically pay three times more for wind power than they would pay for electricity in today’s spot market, and the premium could be higher. A conservative estimate of the total U.S. government (i.e., taxpayer) subsidy to wind power totals over $1,200 per installed kilowatt, even greater than the direct capital cost of wind under advanced technology of around $860 per kilowatt . . .”
These figures and estimates are well over a decade old. With the increase in size of wind turbines, 2.5 MW to even 10 MW nameplate capacities, just escalate the costs to levels that their 12-15% actual production performance can never earn a realistic pay back. With the half-baked rush for additional tax credits and subsidies, the proponents of industrial wind need to rely upon a different “Green” renewable; namely, the funny money printing press.
Glenn R. Schleede’s review, highly recommends the book, “The Wind Farm Scam” by Dr. John Etherington. “It explains wind energy and its limitations and environmental insults in easily understood terms. It explains why wind will never provide a significant, reliable source of electricity. As in the US, “wind farms” are being built in the UK primarily because of government fiat and huge government-forced subsidies, not because of their true environmental, economic or energy benefits.”
Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce provides an insightful account on energy and future developments. A review of this book concludes: “Power Hungry demolishes the notion that oil is dirty; that carbon capture/sequestration schemes can be globally effective; that cap-and-trade/taxation/renewable energy credit ideas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions can do anything but worsen the situation, at the expense of tax and ratepayers. “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” By eliminating the imposters and exposing the disingenuous, he is then able to engage in rational discourse about the genuinely probable technologies that will in future slake our ginormous craving for power.”
Eliminating industrial wind as a viable alternative makes good common sense. Jon Boone offers this description for industrial wind.
“There is little that is cognitively more dissonant than supporting the concept of minimizing the human footprint on the earth while cheerleading for the rude intrusiveness of physically massive/energy feckless wind projects. The slap and tickle of wind propaganda flatters the gullible, exploits the well intentioned, and nurtures the craven. Industrial wind is a bunco scheme of enormous consequence. And people who value intellectual honesty should not quietly be fleeced by such mendacity, even from their government.”
Such a backlash against wind energy inevitably receives stern retaliation from the designers of the new energy economy. Nothing will stand in the way of the cover up and tax abuses of energy exploitation. How can people benefit from this plutocrat plot?
Cap and Trade blowback
What is the primary reason that Wall Street wants to finance, maintain huge equity interests and underwrite industrial wind development? Cap and Trade is the hidden motive behind this defective alternative energy technology and wind turbine development.
The environment and the economy will suffer incalculable greater harm.
The Adverse Economic Impacts from Cap & Trade Regulations on CO2 by Arthur Laffer and Wayne Winegarden concludes: “As currently conceived, cap-and-trade regulations are an economically harmful and ineffective policy for addressing global warming concerns. Because the regulations would constrain GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions, significant price volatility for emissions allowances, such as the volatility that has been evident in the European Union’s emissions market, are a natural consequence. Citing the price volatility issue, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that cap-and trade regulations are not a sound policy for addressing global warming issues.”
Simply put, Rachel Morris in Mother Jones: Could Cap and Trade Cause Another Market Meltdown?, describes the ruse, clearly and to the point.
“Cap and trade would create what Commodity Futures Trading commissioner Bart Chilton anticipates as a $2 trillion market, “the biggest of any [commodities] derivatives product in the next five years.” That derivatives market will be based on two main instruments. First, there are the carbon allowance permits that form the nuts and bolts of any cap-and-trade scheme. Under cap and trade, the government would issue permits that allow companies to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Companies that emit too much can buy allowances from companies that produce less than their limit. Then there are carbon offsets, which allow companies to emit greenhouse gases in excess of a federally mandated cap if they invest in a project that cuts emissions somewhere else—usually in developing countries.
In addition to trading the allowances and offsets themselves, participants in carbon markets can also deal in their derivatives—such as futures contracts to deliver a certain number of allowances at an agreed price and time. These instruments will be traded not only by polluters that need to buy credits to comply with environmental regulations, but also by financial services firms. In fact, a study (PDF) by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions anticipates that if the United States passes a cap-and-trade law, the derivatives trade will probably exceed the market for the allowances themselves. “We are on the verge of creating a new trillion-dollar market in financial assets that will be securitized, derivatized, and speculated by Wall Street like the mortgage-backed securities market,” says Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and a cofounder of the US Climate Task Force.”
The real world consequence of allowing bribes for a continued offset to pollute is obscene.
The Economist has described the theoretical workings of cap-and-trade by stating, “The basic idea is that power plants and manufacturers will be allowed to emit a certain number of tons of carbon. If they exceed that amount, they must buy ‘credits’ from companies that pollute less than their allowance. One day the price of a ton of carbon may be as widely quoted as that of a barrel of oil.”
Those riches would be paper claims on imaginary credits. REC credits (Renewal Energy Certificates) are central to the financiers of industrial wind projects. Trading, hedging, swaps, options and futures are all part of the payday that Wall Street sees for supporting the wind industry. The hoax is real and defies any minimum standard of accountability.
Oreste Vigorito once owned IVPC with Brian Caffyn. When asked about his ongoing involvement with Vigorito, Caffyn who “helped found controversial wind-energy developers Cape Wind and First Wind expressed surprise late last week at news that his one-time partner in a separate wind-energy company in Italy has been arrested and charged with fraud.” The London Financial Times report.
“Gone with the wind”, mounted by the finance ministry’s anti-fraud police, started in 2007 and began by blocking public subsidies worth €9.4m ($14m, £8.4m) granted by the ministry for economic development. Last year, police confiscated seven wind farms with 185 turbines in Sicily linked to IVPC.
Anti-mafia prosecutors in Sicily have launched a parallel investigation. The Financial Times was told in April that a large number of wind farms had been built with public subsidies but had never functioned.”
In September 2009, after First Wind affiliates received $115 million in federal stimulus money, $74.6 million of which for the Cohocton NY project, U.S. Rep. Eric J. Massa (D-N.Y.) wrote to President Barack Obama, calling the grants “very alarming” and saying the company “abused the public trust. “No electricity has been produced for sale out of the projects,” but the company “has already collected production rewards for non-existent energy,” Massa told Obama.
Back in the First Wind SEC IPO application is the acknowledgement that hedging on REC’s was a common practice. One of the projects inclusive in non-existing electric production hedging was the proposed Prattsburgh, NY development. That venture was never built and the developer ultimately made a formal withdrawal from the town and terminated their land leases.
Will the public get an accurate account if those hedges were legal or complied with government regulations? Do not expect federal authorities to keep First Wind honest. The financial ownership of First Wind resides with Madison Dearborn and DE Shaw hedge funds, 42 % for each firm. Madison Dearborn has friends in high places, Rahm Emanuel being one.
After leaving the Clinton administration, Emanuel engaged in investment banking at Wasserstein Perella. Madison Dearborn did business through Emanuel. Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago private equity firm is located is in the same building as Wasserstein’s offices.
The New York Times writes,
“Back in 1998 John Simpson, who ran the Chicago office of the investment banking boutique Wasserstein Perella & Company, had flown to Washington to meet with Mr. Emanuel at the behest of Mr. Simpson’s boss, Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and renowned Wall Street dealmaker who had gotten to know Mr. Emanuel. “I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside,” Mr. Wasserstein, now chairman and chief executive of Lazard, the investment bank, told The Times. “It worked out better than I could have hoped.”
“And better than Mr. Emanuel could have imagined as well. Over the course of a three-hour-plus dinner, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Emanuel discussed how they might work together.”
Upon leaving the private sector, Emanuel received campaign contributions from Madison Dearborn Partners, in the amount of $98,200 from 2002-2010.
Larry Summers did even better. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Mr. Summers joined D.E. Shaw Group in late 2006 as a managing director. He helped develop strategies including new businesses and also helped evaluate investments for the New York firm, which oversees about $30 billion in assets, making it one of the biggest hedge-fund managers in the world.”
The New York Times publishes, “Mr. Summers and Shaw executives say his role there was to be a sounding board for Shaw’s traders. But interviews with friends and former colleagues suggest that Mr. Summers’s role at D. E. Shaw was wider and more complex.”
The Business Insider goes further. “According to the NYT, Larry Summers worked just one day a week while making $5.2 million in two years at hedge fund D.E. Shaw.”
Brian Caffyn’s high-powered friends in the Obama’s Washington translate into “special treatment” for First Wind. Cap and Trade would be a god sent for an industrial wind developer with a history of failed projects (see Cohocton Wind Watch), equity and hedge fund firms, a corrupt – pay to play – presidential administration and every other Wall Street guru who believes that the privileged deserve every ill-gotten penny they can steal.
The Street drives this next generation and refined Enron wind swindle industry, into a financial abyss every bit as deep as the lack of meaningful electric generation, from their inefficient wind turbines. The government pours subsidies, grants, guaranteed loans and tax credit monies down a black hole, in a futile attempt to spend our county into energy independence.
Did you ever wonder why the state refuses to foster a true independent energy economy for the nation, while conducting privileged cronyism for friends of the financial ruling class? Well, look no further than the rewards given to crooked industrial wind developers for building useless projects that do not generate useable electricity, but sell phony REC credits for energy that is never produced. Criminal indictments are long overdue. The next financial bubble assures to have the stench and foul odor of the Cap and Trade system. Allowing State/Capitalism to pervert the financial markets cost us much more than just higher electric bills.
James Hall – April 13, 2010
Financial scandals are not new. Schemes to leverage risk and cheat the public are mainstays of the mad “Cap and Trade” stratagem, in the ongoing war, against genuine free enterprise. The latest ploy is the industrial wind swindle.
In the essay, Wall Street Reaps Big Bucks from the Wind, the strategy to defraud the public is explored. “The latest rage out of the boiler room sharks that hawk new equity issues touts alternative energy. The hype that is coming out of Wall Street resembles the internet band wagon before the bust . . . Goldman Sachs rushes to finance the offers with their expertise – using other peoples’ money . . . Understand from the outset, that producing useful energy is not the prime objective of wind projects.”
To illustrate this point the pending First Wind Holdings Inc. SEC S-1 and S-1A application for an IPO readily admits that producing electricity it is not necessary to be profitable.
Understanding the complexity of industrial wind can be a challenge. The derogative knock NIMBY, is meant to deceive and distract from the reality that an ill “Wall Street” wind blows behind the heretical doctrine of global warming.
Jon Boone PhD is a leading voice against industrial wind. WHY WIND WON’T WORK is a primer that dispels the myth that wind factories are a sensible solution to electric generation, much less a remedy for climate change.
“The hope for wind energy stems from a belief that it will offset significant carbon emissions as it substitutes for dirty burning coal plants. But what is the evidence for this? Any analysis examining this issue must account for (1) what happens as wind energy enters the grid, causing grid operators to turn off or back conventional generators in response (or hold back generators that might otherwise have been deployed if there were no wind energy), and (2) what happens as operators seek to integrate wind’s wild fluctuations.
Wind adds another layer of instability that must be smoothed out so that demand and supply are balanced precisely. Controllers respond to the wind influx by dialing back the generation from the operation of conventional units, much as they do when demand decreases. And as the level of wind energy flutters about the grid, rising and falling at random, rapidly responsive conventional generators are deployed to balance this ebb and flow. When wind energy disappears from the grid, it is as if demand has again increased, and more power is required from conventional sources to match it.”
In a significant analysis, Less For More: The Rube Goldberg Nature of Industrial Wind Development, Dr. Boone concludes:
“Wind energy, at industrial scales operating within the grid system as a whole, must be considered as only one of the reciprocals in a fuel mix; it must be entangled with conventional fuel to make it viable even as a sporadic fuel substitute. Wind energy simply cannot be loosed on the grid by itself. Grid stability requires that the fluctuations of wind be backed or compensated for immediately by conventional, reliable generation on a minute by minute basis—that is, generation from highly flexible, rapidly responsive thermal or hydro units.”
Since generating usable and reliable electricity is not the prime purpose for a wind developer, what impact can the ratepayer expect in their electric bill?
A succinct explanation on The True Cost of Electricity from Wind is Always Underestimated and its Value Always Overestimated, in the Science & Public Policy Institute, comes from this Glenn R. Schleede report. Mr. Schleede states:
“When initially proposed, wind energy advocates argued that tax breaks and subsidies were necessary to permit a relatively “new and developing technology” to gain a foothold in competition with other sources of energy for producing electricity. However, industry demands for continuation, expansion and extension of subsidies have made it clear that there are no longer any serious expectations that wind energy is competitive or that improvements in the technology will eventually make it competitive.
Instead, it appears that the only hope that wind energy would become economically competitive with traditional energy sources is if the cost of electricity from traditional sources were driven much higher – with all the adverse impacts on electric customers and local and national economies that result from high electricity prices.”
Just how much more will consumers pay in higher rates over the conventional methods of electric generation?
In the report, RENEWABLE ENERGY Not Cheap, Not “Green” by Robert L. Bradley Jr. in the Cato Policy Analysis No. 280, August 27, 1997 wrote, “ratepayers typically pay three times more for wind power than they would pay for electricity in today’s spot market, and the premium could be higher. A conservative estimate of the total U.S. government (i.e., taxpayer) subsidy to wind power totals over $1,200 per installed kilowatt, even greater than the direct capital cost of wind under advanced technology of around $860 per kilowatt . . .”
These figures and estimates are well over a decade old. With the increase in size of wind turbines, 2.5 MW to even 10 MW nameplate capacities, just escalate the costs to levels that their 12-15% actual production performance can never earn a realistic pay back. With the half-baked rush for additional tax credits and subsidies, the proponents of industrial wind need to rely upon a different “Green” renewable; namely, the funny money printing press.
Glenn R. Schleede’s review, highly recommends the book, “The Wind Farm Scam” by Dr. John Etherington. “It explains wind energy and its limitations and environmental insults in easily understood terms. It explains why wind will never provide a significant, reliable source of electricity. As in the US, “wind farms” are being built in the UK primarily because of government fiat and huge government-forced subsidies, not because of their true environmental, economic or energy benefits.”
Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce provides an insightful account on energy and future developments. A review of this book concludes: “Power Hungry demolishes the notion that oil is dirty; that carbon capture/sequestration schemes can be globally effective; that cap-and-trade/taxation/renewable energy credit ideas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions can do anything but worsen the situation, at the expense of tax and ratepayers. “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” By eliminating the imposters and exposing the disingenuous, he is then able to engage in rational discourse about the genuinely probable technologies that will in future slake our ginormous craving for power.”
Eliminating industrial wind as a viable alternative makes good common sense. Jon Boone offers this description for industrial wind.
“There is little that is cognitively more dissonant than supporting the concept of minimizing the human footprint on the earth while cheerleading for the rude intrusiveness of physically massive/energy feckless wind projects. The slap and tickle of wind propaganda flatters the gullible, exploits the well intentioned, and nurtures the craven. Industrial wind is a bunco scheme of enormous consequence. And people who value intellectual honesty should not quietly be fleeced by such mendacity, even from their government.”
Such a backlash against wind energy inevitably receives stern retaliation from the designers of the new energy economy. Nothing will stand in the way of the cover up and tax abuses of energy exploitation. How can people benefit from this plutocrat plot?
Cap and Trade blowback
What is the primary reason that Wall Street wants to finance, maintain huge equity interests and underwrite industrial wind development? Cap and Trade is the hidden motive behind this defective alternative energy technology and wind turbine development.
The environment and the economy will suffer incalculable greater harm.
The Adverse Economic Impacts from Cap & Trade Regulations on CO2 by Arthur Laffer and Wayne Winegarden concludes: “As currently conceived, cap-and-trade regulations are an economically harmful and ineffective policy for addressing global warming concerns. Because the regulations would constrain GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions, significant price volatility for emissions allowances, such as the volatility that has been evident in the European Union’s emissions market, are a natural consequence. Citing the price volatility issue, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that cap-and trade regulations are not a sound policy for addressing global warming issues.”
Simply put, Rachel Morris in Mother Jones: Could Cap and Trade Cause Another Market Meltdown?, describes the ruse, clearly and to the point.
“Cap and trade would create what Commodity Futures Trading commissioner Bart Chilton anticipates as a $2 trillion market, “the biggest of any [commodities] derivatives product in the next five years.” That derivatives market will be based on two main instruments. First, there are the carbon allowance permits that form the nuts and bolts of any cap-and-trade scheme. Under cap and trade, the government would issue permits that allow companies to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Companies that emit too much can buy allowances from companies that produce less than their limit. Then there are carbon offsets, which allow companies to emit greenhouse gases in excess of a federally mandated cap if they invest in a project that cuts emissions somewhere else—usually in developing countries.
In addition to trading the allowances and offsets themselves, participants in carbon markets can also deal in their derivatives—such as futures contracts to deliver a certain number of allowances at an agreed price and time. These instruments will be traded not only by polluters that need to buy credits to comply with environmental regulations, but also by financial services firms. In fact, a study (PDF) by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions anticipates that if the United States passes a cap-and-trade law, the derivatives trade will probably exceed the market for the allowances themselves. “We are on the verge of creating a new trillion-dollar market in financial assets that will be securitized, derivatized, and speculated by Wall Street like the mortgage-backed securities market,” says Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and a cofounder of the US Climate Task Force.”
The real world consequence of allowing bribes for a continued offset to pollute is obscene.
The Economist has described the theoretical workings of cap-and-trade by stating, “The basic idea is that power plants and manufacturers will be allowed to emit a certain number of tons of carbon. If they exceed that amount, they must buy ‘credits’ from companies that pollute less than their allowance. One day the price of a ton of carbon may be as widely quoted as that of a barrel of oil.”
Those riches would be paper claims on imaginary credits. REC credits (Renewal Energy Certificates) are central to the financiers of industrial wind projects. Trading, hedging, swaps, options and futures are all part of the payday that Wall Street sees for supporting the wind industry. The hoax is real and defies any minimum standard of accountability.
Oreste Vigorito once owned IVPC with Brian Caffyn. When asked about his ongoing involvement with Vigorito, Caffyn who “helped found controversial wind-energy developers Cape Wind and First Wind expressed surprise late last week at news that his one-time partner in a separate wind-energy company in Italy has been arrested and charged with fraud.” The London Financial Times report.
“Gone with the wind”, mounted by the finance ministry’s anti-fraud police, started in 2007 and began by blocking public subsidies worth €9.4m ($14m, £8.4m) granted by the ministry for economic development. Last year, police confiscated seven wind farms with 185 turbines in Sicily linked to IVPC.
Anti-mafia prosecutors in Sicily have launched a parallel investigation. The Financial Times was told in April that a large number of wind farms had been built with public subsidies but had never functioned.”
In September 2009, after First Wind affiliates received $115 million in federal stimulus money, $74.6 million of which for the Cohocton NY project, U.S. Rep. Eric J. Massa (D-N.Y.) wrote to President Barack Obama, calling the grants “very alarming” and saying the company “abused the public trust. “No electricity has been produced for sale out of the projects,” but the company “has already collected production rewards for non-existent energy,” Massa told Obama.
Back in the First Wind SEC IPO application is the acknowledgement that hedging on REC’s was a common practice. One of the projects inclusive in non-existing electric production hedging was the proposed Prattsburgh, NY development. That venture was never built and the developer ultimately made a formal withdrawal from the town and terminated their land leases.
Will the public get an accurate account if those hedges were legal or complied with government regulations? Do not expect federal authorities to keep First Wind honest. The financial ownership of First Wind resides with Madison Dearborn and DE Shaw hedge funds, 42 % for each firm. Madison Dearborn has friends in high places, Rahm Emanuel being one.
After leaving the Clinton administration, Emanuel engaged in investment banking at Wasserstein Perella. Madison Dearborn did business through Emanuel. Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago private equity firm is located is in the same building as Wasserstein’s offices.
The New York Times writes,
“Back in 1998 John Simpson, who ran the Chicago office of the investment banking boutique Wasserstein Perella & Company, had flown to Washington to meet with Mr. Emanuel at the behest of Mr. Simpson’s boss, Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and renowned Wall Street dealmaker who had gotten to know Mr. Emanuel. “I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside,” Mr. Wasserstein, now chairman and chief executive of Lazard, the investment bank, told The Times. “It worked out better than I could have hoped.”
“And better than Mr. Emanuel could have imagined as well. Over the course of a three-hour-plus dinner, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Emanuel discussed how they might work together.”
Upon leaving the private sector, Emanuel received campaign contributions from Madison Dearborn Partners, in the amount of $98,200 from 2002-2010.
Larry Summers did even better. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Mr. Summers joined D.E. Shaw Group in late 2006 as a managing director. He helped develop strategies including new businesses and also helped evaluate investments for the New York firm, which oversees about $30 billion in assets, making it one of the biggest hedge-fund managers in the world.”
The New York Times publishes, “Mr. Summers and Shaw executives say his role there was to be a sounding board for Shaw’s traders. But interviews with friends and former colleagues suggest that Mr. Summers’s role at D. E. Shaw was wider and more complex.”
The Business Insider goes further. “According to the NYT, Larry Summers worked just one day a week while making $5.2 million in two years at hedge fund D.E. Shaw.”
Brian Caffyn’s high-powered friends in the Obama’s Washington translate into “special treatment” for First Wind. Cap and Trade would be a god sent for an industrial wind developer with a history of failed projects (see Cohocton Wind Watch), equity and hedge fund firms, a corrupt – pay to play – presidential administration and every other Wall Street guru who believes that the privileged deserve every ill-gotten penny they can steal.
The Street drives this next generation and refined Enron wind swindle industry, into a financial abyss every bit as deep as the lack of meaningful electric generation, from their inefficient wind turbines. The government pours subsidies, grants, guaranteed loans and tax credit monies down a black hole, in a futile attempt to spend our county into energy independence.
Did you ever wonder why the state refuses to foster a true independent energy economy for the nation, while conducting privileged cronyism for friends of the financial ruling class? Well, look no further than the rewards given to crooked industrial wind developers for building useless projects that do not generate useable electricity, but sell phony REC credits for energy that is never produced. Criminal indictments are long overdue. The next financial bubble assures to have the stench and foul odor of the Cap and Trade system. Allowing State/Capitalism to pervert the financial markets cost us much more than just higher electric bills.
James Hall – April 13, 2010
Thursday, September 8, 2011
We can still love our planet! Alternatives to the Wind Energy Alternative
Another thing, I'm sick of being labeled a "fanatic", and "anti-environmentalist", a "NIMBY" who cares only for what this means to my land... it's just not true. Most Bent Mountain citizens are here because we love nature and love this planet. We want to preserve and care for the mountains that have preserved and cared for us.
Mountains are a non-renewable resource, and we should cherish them and the ecosystems they support.
Some people say that this wind farm will be great for Roanoke, creating jobs and so on... but that is just not true! There is nothing saying that Invenergy has to hire local people to build the turbines... and after they are built, they require maybe one or two minimum wage workers for any security or maintenance. Where are these jobs then? They don't exist!
The people in the valley have been brain-washed into thinking that these turbines will create hundreds of jobs, reduce the cost of their energy bills, and allow them to continue living their excessive, energy-consuming lives guilt-free. This is just not true.
My alternative to the alternative of industrual wind being thrown down in the middle of the most densely populated and expensive area on this side of the state? How about researching solar and geothermal energy production... that seems to be where the future lies! Countries that have utilized wind energy for decades are now looking for ways to dismantle them and get their energy some other way. Wind can be helpful as a back-up source, but with the current technology, is too space consuming and difficult to ever be relied on to fully replace other kinds of energy.
We should also focus on educating individuals and helping them to re-examine their own lifestyles, how they use energy, and come up with sensible ways to conserve!
What about jobs? We desperately need some job creation in Roanoke, so in order to help the environment and create real, long-term local jobs, how about implementing a mandatory community recycling program?
It is crazy that Roanoke county doesn't have one yet, crazier still that VA hasn't made recycling for all counties mandatory. By creating this recycling program, we help our environment, reduce waste, teach individual responsibility for the planet while creating jobs. We would need people for management positions, pick-up, sorting, etc. That would be a much better way to help the planet and our community without dismantling an entire town and destroying a mountain in the process!
What do you think?
Mountains are a non-renewable resource, and we should cherish them and the ecosystems they support.
Some people say that this wind farm will be great for Roanoke, creating jobs and so on... but that is just not true! There is nothing saying that Invenergy has to hire local people to build the turbines... and after they are built, they require maybe one or two minimum wage workers for any security or maintenance. Where are these jobs then? They don't exist!
The people in the valley have been brain-washed into thinking that these turbines will create hundreds of jobs, reduce the cost of their energy bills, and allow them to continue living their excessive, energy-consuming lives guilt-free. This is just not true.
My alternative to the alternative of industrual wind being thrown down in the middle of the most densely populated and expensive area on this side of the state? How about researching solar and geothermal energy production... that seems to be where the future lies! Countries that have utilized wind energy for decades are now looking for ways to dismantle them and get their energy some other way. Wind can be helpful as a back-up source, but with the current technology, is too space consuming and difficult to ever be relied on to fully replace other kinds of energy.
We should also focus on educating individuals and helping them to re-examine their own lifestyles, how they use energy, and come up with sensible ways to conserve!
What about jobs? We desperately need some job creation in Roanoke, so in order to help the environment and create real, long-term local jobs, how about implementing a mandatory community recycling program?
It is crazy that Roanoke county doesn't have one yet, crazier still that VA hasn't made recycling for all counties mandatory. By creating this recycling program, we help our environment, reduce waste, teach individual responsibility for the planet while creating jobs. We would need people for management positions, pick-up, sorting, etc. That would be a much better way to help the planet and our community without dismantling an entire town and destroying a mountain in the process!
What do you think?
The Bent Mountain Wind Farm
A community thrives when it nourishes its assets, not wastes them.
All of the sudden, Bent Mountain is on the minds of the rest of Roanoke. In my home-owning experience, I have noticed that we are by and large ignored completely by the rest of the county. But here we are, making newspaper headlines (well front page anyway). Not to help us strengthen and enliven our neighborhood, but to take short-sighted measures to ensure it becomes a ghost town. I hope you can see by allowing an outside company to come in, clear cut our mountain top, and put enormous turbines in our backyards you are in effect, hurting the entire county. This is no boon for us or for the environment. And what for?
You’ve heard it before. The energy it may produce in this terrain has not been studied; with erratic mountain wind patterns and an ineffectual design and inefficient storage capacity, the benefits seem likely to fall short from outweighing the negative effect this will have on the environment. The destruction of the ecosystem; the natural water table, the streams, the Roanoke river; habitats for human, plant, and animal will be negatively impacted.
What about all of those nasty health effects from the turbines? Sleeplessness, vertigo, nervous disorders, depression, etc. etc. Again, never tested in mountainous terrain, it could be amplified a thousand fold. No one knows.
Even those who would rather ignore the interests, the health and the well-being of Bent Mountain and its residents should consider this:
Self-preservation. After this wind farm is cleared to be built, I will try to sell my home before it’s worth less than what I owe. I sank every penny I had to buy this house. I put my heart into maintaining its value and beauty. I feel that is being stolen from me, that my immense financial and emotional investment could amount to nothing, and I feel helpless to stop it. I don’t want to live shadowed by 500 ft high turbines making sporadic or constant noises, blocking out the stars, cutting into sunshine, and marring the mountain. But neither will anyone else.
No one will buy my home. It will sit until I can no longer afford to keep it and it will go into foreclosure. I will be left with nothing. Others feel the same way, many have already put their homes on the market; some have already been on sale for years. How do you think living in a county with a bunch of empty homes worth next to nothing and hideously tall and ugly turbines also worth next to nothing will affect YOUR property values? How much will those empty worthless homes cost the rest of the county’s residents?
And once they get the clearance and permits to build a few turbines, you can bet they'll build more. And it won't be limited to just one mountain either. Potential homebuyers will avoid Roanoke county even if the wind farm is across town; because where there is one there is the potential for many more. Why take the chance that your home will be directly impeded on by future industrialization when you can just go somewhere else instead?
No one will buy my home. It will sit until I can no longer afford to keep it and it will go into foreclosure. I will be left with nothing. Others feel the same way, many have already put their homes on the market; some have already been on sale for years. How do you think living in a county with a bunch of empty homes worth next to nothing and hideously tall and ugly turbines also worth next to nothing will affect YOUR property values? How much will those empty worthless homes cost the rest of the county’s residents?
And once they get the clearance and permits to build a few turbines, you can bet they'll build more. And it won't be limited to just one mountain either. Potential homebuyers will avoid Roanoke county even if the wind farm is across town; because where there is one there is the potential for many more. Why take the chance that your home will be directly impeded on by future industrialization when you can just go somewhere else instead?
Invenergy has no desire to help the environment. They have a desire to help themselves to loads of federal money in “green energy credits”. They don’t care one bit about our community or our planet. I think they came here thinking we’re a bunch of bumpkins they could flash 800K at and plow down this neighborhood without a fight. When I first heard about a potential wind farm here, I was excited. Until I researched and spoke to neighbors and looked at the facts. I was unprepared and astonished at the amount of evidence that this will do more harm than good. I think a good many of us were.
The company thought they could come in here and pull one over on us, and I think, I hope, that they were dead wrong.
No long-term jobs will be created. If we’re lucky this Chicago-based company might hire some locals for the construction. Then again, maybe they won’t. After that, nothing more needs to be done. They collect their mountains of money in federal subsidies and we collect mountains of ugliness and foreclosed homes. A community destroyed by short-sightedness. The mountain will be ruined and the company will move on to their next small town, in other words, their next potential mountain of money. Maybe they’ll lease even more land and continue building these skyscraper-sized turbines until Bent Mountain is one huge range of 500 ft high metal monstrosities. How does this benefit the environment? Why didn’t they go to a less populated part of VA? Why not go to sparsely populated areas of the mid-west, where wind is strong and steady and build turbines to correctly and efficiently store the energy for use elsewhere? Why in this densely populated county with pristine mountains and higher property values than every neighboring county? Why has this discussion even been allowed to go this far?
What about the airport? I wonder how many air travel companies will pull contracts when they hear their planes can’t land in Roanoke during inclement weather because they can no longer clear Poor Mountain? The airport goes out of business, jobs will be lost, and other companies won’t want to move here. More potential jobs lost.
$800,000?? They offer less than a million dollars to sacrifice the residence of over 1,000 Roanoke taxpayers who love their homes and their land. A little perspective, the county is spending 20 million dollars alone to widen less than a mile of road and build some extra bridges for reasons unfathomable to me. And you are ready to accept a mere 800,000 to destroy a town? Let’s say the average Bent Mountain resident pays $2,500 a year in property taxes. 320 families is all it takes to generate $800,000 in revenue EACH YEAR. Not to mention the other benefits and revenue this community brings the county. It makes more sense to make an effort to encourage the community to grow, to entice more taxpaying homebuyers and businesses to move here. But after these turbines scar the mountain, endanger the wildlife, and ruin our views, who in the world will want to be here who doesn’t have to? You will lose all of your higher income/higher tax bracket residents and they will move somewhere else. No one new will ever move here, houses will stay empty.
There is nothing of lasting value for Roanoke County in this deal, absolutely nothing.
Roanoke’s greatest value is in its beauty, the mountains, the beautiful hawks and brown eagles, the awesome sunrises and blue-tinted vistas. This county’s value is the mountain, pure and simple. Why did I move here years ago over any number of areas on the eastern half of the US? The breathtaking beauty. Billions of stars in a clear, black sky. Why did my family and neighbors move here years ago? Panoramic views of the valley and mountain tops cascading from one end to the other. The mountain.
Destroy the mountains and you will destroy Roanoke. It will become nothing more than a flat metal-lined truck stop on the way out. You could be paving the way for the unending industrialization of this community, literally. And again I ask, what for?
Please don’t forsake this area’s greatest assets, its people and its beauty.
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