The politics of wind power

[Dover]

The politics of wind power (long article)


"The moment I read that paper," the wind entrepreneur Peter Mandelstam recalled, "I knew in my gut where my next wind project would be."


I was having lunch with Mandelstam last fall to discuss offshore wind in general and how he and his tiny company, Bluewater Wind, came to focus on Delaware as a likely place for a nascent and beleaguered offshore wind industry to establish itself. Mandelstam had been running late all morning. I knew this because I received a half-dozen messages on my cellphone from members of his staff, who relayed his oncoming approach like air-traffic controllers guiding a wayward trans-Atlantic flight into Kennedy International Airport. This was the Bluewater touch — crisp, informative, ever-helpful, a supercharged, Eagle Scout attentiveness that was part corporate style, part calculated public-relations approach. It would pay off tremendously in his company's barnstorming campaign of Delaware town meetings and radio appearances to capture what he had reason to believe would be the first offshore-wind project in U.S. history.


These features were, unsurprisingly, manifestations of Mandelstam himself, who arrived in a suit and tie, a wry smile, his wiry hair parted in the middle and tamped down like someone who had made a smooth transition from a Don Martin cartoon. Mandelstam, a 47-year-old native New Yorker who is capable of quoting Central European poets and oddball meteorological factoids with ease, had long committed himself — and the tiny company he formed in 1999 — to building utility-scale wind-power plants offshore, a decision that, to many wind-industry observers, seemed to fly in the face of common sense. Offshore marine construction was wildly, painfully expensive — like standing in a cold shower and ripping up stacks of thousand-dollar bills. The very laws for permitting and siting such projects had yet to be enacted. Indeed, the recent past was littered with failed offshore wind projects. Never mind that there were so many more opportunities in the continental United States to build land-based wind farms, which cost half as much as offshore projects. While wind-energy companies in Europe were moving offshore at great speed, neither Mandelstam nor anyone else had ever successfully built an offshore wind farm in the United States. Failed, stalled or delayed projects sounded like a catalogue of coastal shipwrecks: Long Island, Padre Island, Cape Wind. Entrepreneurs, of course, need to anticipate the next market, but when it came to offshore wind, Mandelstam seemed too far ahead of the curve to ever succeed.

..snip..

In the end, the back and forth between wind-energy supporters and opponents is ultimately about the role the federal government should play in shaping the energy market. "You and I are subsidizing wind energy," the banker Bruno Mejean reminded me with a smile when I spoke to him last year. "How you feel about that depends upon how you frame the argument. If it's about energy security, then we should do as many wind farms as we can. But by paying the prices for the energy and by providing the tax breaks, big corporations like Florida Power and Light, General Electric and others are reducing their taxes at our expense. It's a political hot potato."

Is it right for Congress to single out an industry like wind power and favor it with tax credits? Mandelstam argues that when it comes to energy, free markets are a mirage. "Let's be honest," he says. "The government makes policy decisions about technologies and industries all the time. The producer tax credit helps finance wind-energy projects that actually get built and that actually produce energy. It leverages private dollars and private initiative, and at the end of the day is a tiny subsidy." He notes that most of the world's oil supply is owned by national governments: "No serious economist or public policy analyst would suggest that this industry, by some reckoning the largest on the planet, operates as a free market. Within the United States, the regulations and the laws both for fossil fuel and for the electricity market are a web of sometimes contradictory regulations and subsidies. It's a fiction that there's a free market with energy." But if energy markets aren't free, then who is at the helm?..cont'd

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/14/business/14windt.php

[kristopher]

1. Good article worth reading if you're interested in our energy choices

Mandelstam is a point man for offshore wind development. Jim Gordon of Cape Wind has become so knotted up with the Hyannis Country Club set trying to put him out of business that he hasn't been leading the larger effort to start building offshore. Mandelstam is taking up the cause and it looks like he is making some real headway.

Again, good article.