Gov. McCrory is quoted in a WUNC article on “Historic Wind Farm Coming to Northeastern NC”:
The Governor says this project stands as an example of how renewable-energy friendly policies like tax breaks and portfolio standards can work.
The governor is right; it is. They work by tricking farmers into giving over land for highly expensive, highly unreliable, highly unsustainable power sources that require an uninterrupted stream of government funding and tax credits just to stay afloat, a steady stream that big crony industry whores both love and know how to exploit for profit and good PR, and as an added bonus turns usually conservative rural areas into unwitting welfare takers so as to blunt a potential principled ideological threat against the scheme.
It’s a perfect example of how Big Renewable Energy Industry–friendly policies like huge special tax breaks and portfolio standards forcing monopoly providers into buying the overpriced, unreliable, intermittent and otherwise unmarketable junk can “work.”
Oh, and the fact that everyone — politicians, recipient cronies, and lapdog media — ooh and ahh over “jobs” and totally ignore opportunity costs and worse, the inevitable and completely unnecessary electricity rate hikes to follow, is another way this nonsense can “work.”
The poor? They can work, too … a little harder to pay for their electricity rates. There’s a big crony lovefest going on with politicians, big industry, and media, to which of course they’re not invited.
