Ohio energy mandate: 20% wind

A Business First story extols the virtues of wind:

The Environment Ohio report examined the economic and environmental effects of the state requiring 20 percent of its electricity be produced by wind sources by 2020. The report projected Ohio would:

* Gain 40,000 man-years of employment through 2020, the equivalent of 3,100 permanent jobs, with an added $3.7 billion in wages paid.
* Increase its gross product by $8.2 billion.
* Generate up to $1.5 billion in property taxes for county governments.
* Supplement rural landowners’ incomes by $200 million.
* Avoid the release of 170 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of taking more than 2 million cars off the road, and other pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury.

The report accompanies Environment Ohio’s proposed law that would mandate that 20% of Ohio’s electricity come from “renewable sources” by 2020.

The fact is that if wind were so wonderful, power companies would be adopting it on a large scale without any prompting from the state legislature. But wind will be more expensive than what we have now, hence the need for a mandate. And boasting about all the new jobs it will create is a bit perverse; we’ll all be paying those additional salaries through our electric bill- $3.7b according to the report.

In fact everything’s backwards. Higher gross product, higher taxes, etc. What you want to hear about an energy program is that it will reduce the number of man-hours, the state’s gross product, and taxes because it will do more for less. It’s an energy program, not a jobs creation program.

The report didn’t address the effect a 20 percent renewable energy requirement by 2020 would have on electricity rates in Ohio.

You bet it didn’t.

Another problem with wind in Ohio is wind’s seasonal nature. A wind speed map on the organization’s site maps average wind speed over a year. But like most places, Ohio has great variation in wind over the course of a year. In this winter map from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, most of Ohio is rated a 3 out of 7 in wind “Power Class”. In summer, it drops to a 1, the lowest rating. So most wind will need to be generated on Lake Erie and we’ll need to retain nearly all of our on-demand energy production capacity anyway in order to supply electricity when there’s almost no wind. And that’s in the summer, the period of peak demand. Wind is not on-demand.

None of this should be taken to mean that I’m against wind power or other renewable sources. We should be spending money on increasing it’s efficiency and finding areas where it can work. But a 20% mandate for the state is the wrong way to go, and will be too expensive.

Here’s Environment Ohio’s report.