Wind generation has reached its current level of market penetration only through the aid of costly government tax incentives, garnered by groups like AWEA, that ultimately serve to diminish baseload capacity and reduce our grid's reliability
The Wind Lobby's Preemptive Strike on the Perry Grid Study
In an April 14 memo circulated through the Department of Energy, Secretary Rick Perry ordered a 60-day DOE study of the electric grid examining "the extent to which continued regulatory burdens, as well as mandates and tax and subsidy policies, are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants." In this era of overwrought political outrage, even an innocuous, consumer-focused initiative such as this grid study can become the focus of a partisan furor. And indeed this study has.
Just three days after Perry ordered the DOE study, American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) CEO Tom Kiernan issued a memo of his own laying out an explicit plan to delegitimize the project. The memo--obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, posted on the open-publishing website Scribd, and subsequently deleted--catalogued a series of actions AWEA would pursue to undermine DOE's as-of-yet unpublished study.
As Kiernan wrote on April 17:
