Lars Larson: Windmills 5X more expensive, produce 1/2 electricity of gas

by Lars Larson

It’s not very hard to make the case against those windmills.

You know in Europe, they say that they’re putting in all kinds of alternative sources of energy: solar geothermal, things like that.

And here in America, we’ve got politicians who think “That’s the cat meow – we’ve got to do the same thing.”

Here’s the problem, and it’s illustrated by something that’s happening in Wales right now. In Wales, they want to put up 800 huge windmills to generate electricity. Those windmills are going to cost around 2 billion pounds to build and they’re going to generate about 300 average megawatts of power – this all from the London Daily Telegraph.

What could they build instead? Well, they could spend about 20% of that amount of money, 400 million pounds, and build natural gas-fired power plants that would generate two and a half times as much electricity.

Would you spend five times as much money to get less than half the power from the supposedly “free” wind? That doesn’t make any sense to me.