Green policy favors giants

The wind turbines sprouted on our horizon last year, utterly changing the look of it. A nacelle the size of an RV sits atop a tower as tall as a football field is long, slinging three fiberglass blades as long as semi trailers. Multiply that by 75, strung out over 10 miles along the bluffs above the river.

From our farm three miles away, we can't hear the turbines. The folks living nearby aren't so lucky.

To squelch the slowly maddening whoosh of the giant blades making electricity to run air conditioners a hundred miles away in Dallas, they have to close their windows to the cooling breeze, and switch on their own AC. They never see a dime, or burn a watt, from the turbines.

Some see the force spinning the turbines as the wind of change. To others, it's just the usual cyclone of hot air strewing perverse business-as-usual incentives out of D.C.

This is not a Sierra Club lament against progress' collateral damage to scenery. It's not a property-rights rant against corporate-financed eminent domain. It's an expression of frustrated concern at how the "green" steering U.S. energy policies is the kind that lobbyists spend, spinning outcomes that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Just follow the money. FPL, the corporation that owns the turbines, racks up a tax credit with every turn of the blades. Two cents per kilowatt-hour doesn't sound like much, but even if the turbines generate far less power than rated, the company could still rake in $4 million a year.

Under the new economic stimulus, corporations can instead take a new credit tied to the cost of the turbines themselves, or even a Treasury grant to help pay for them.

The rest of us hereabouts occupy the shifting shadows, and the low-frequency hum that used to be silence, with little benefit.

I've had my eye on a much smaller wind generator for our own farm, and there's stimulus money for that, too. But I get only one option, compared with the corporations' best pick of three. The feds will let me cut one year's income tax by 30 percent of whatever I spend on a new windmill.

Wind energy advocate Paul Gipe points out that giving renewable energy production tax credits only to corporations just pays the big to get bigger. FPL owns about half the installed wind electrical generating capacity in the United States, along with nuclear power plants.

In some other countries, Gipe says, "feed-in tariffs" pay all producers above-market rates for the renewable electricity they generate. In such places, groups of farmers, cities or neighbors band together to build turbines, and no single firm dominates the wind-energy market. In Germany, such community associations own nearly 30 percent of wind turbines.

The problem isn't just who produces power, but also how it's used. Using energy more efficiently -- or just using less, period -- saves more cash and carbon than even the cleanest means of generation.

Simple conservation measures, like weatherization, get a solid boost from the stimulus, but it's short-lived. Meanwhile, production subsidies, which have doubled since 1999, will keep growing, feeding both off older laws and the new energy bill.

For production, both current and pending incentives throw the most green at the least green. Biofuels alone got four times more federal subsidies for 2007 than all other renewable energy sources combined, going by the Department of Energy's latest numbers.

In similarly backward fashion, fossil fuels get three times more subsidies than do renewables. In 2007, wind electricity got half as much as nuclear power, and just a quarter of coal's handout.

Worse yet, the department's $17 billion estimate of all energy subsidies in 2007 is just a speck against the $700 billion flung -- faster and with far less discussion -- at rescuing the financial industry.

Less than the sum of accounting errors in the bank bailout could have saved our area's views from ruin, or at least more equably shared the benefits of the energy that the ruination generates.

Those options never made it down to the little people's end of the table. Unlike Congress, though, we can still spend smartly -- on using less energy, more wisely.

-- Wylie Harris ranches with his family in Cooke County, Texas, north of Fort Worth. He wrote this comment for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.