Reason and facts often fall prey to passion. And Charles Koch passionately opposes wind power as well as President Obama, views that he recently advanced in a single op-ed on the perpetually wind-bashing, editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.
In the September 10th Wall Street Journal, apparently realizing that electric rates are flat or down in most parts of the country, Koch wrote: "...the government is pushing up energy prices for all of us--five times as much as in the case of wind generated electricity."
No doubt that Koch and the WSJ editorial page believes that wind costs "five times as much." It, however, just is not so!
Michael Liebreich, Chief Executive of Bloomberg's New Energy Finance, dismantles Koch. Speaking of the "five times as much charge," Liebreich writes: "It is an extraordinary claim, with no evidence to support it. Bloomberg New Energy Finance's regular levelized cost calculations--based on real data from folk who build clean energy projects--show that wind energy is in many cases competitive with new-build coal capacity. Wind is also nearly competitive with new-build gas capacity if you use a gas price rising quickly to $4 and then on $6 per million British thermal units, as the future curve suggests you should, rather than the current spot price of $3." www.bnef.com/WhitePapers/view/130.
Koch and the WSJ have an ideological world view that they passionately advance and defend. In it, wind will always cost five times as much, no matter what it does in the real world. .
Amazing...my distrust in what I read in the newspaper grows with each day
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