The following is from: David Pristash  

If you are here on this forum, then you are probably an engineer or technical person like me and are interested in technical issues. Over the past six years or more I have worked exclusively on energy related projects. But I got into energy seriously after CWRU sponsored the National Energy Seminar in June 2005 at Severance Hall here in Cleveland. That was an eye opening event as I came away from it seeing that there was no US Energy Policy despite the fact a panel of "experts" knew then  an Energy crisis was coming.

Since then I have devoted as much time as I could to see from a technical point of view what would make the most sense. What I found was confusion on terms, what energy and storage are, where the energy is and how to get clean energy. For example, how can E85 be considered clean when it emits more CO2 then gasoline on a per mile basis? But then the DOE is driven by politics more then science and so its no surprise we get E85 and there is a big push for wind turbines.

What I would like to do is show why "wind turbines" are a bad idea. But before I do that, I'm going to need to set the stage. So the first thing I'm going to do is show how energy should be classified and what it costs to produce.This is an important issue as the US Congress is going to be voting on a bill  -- H.R. 2454, the "American Clean Energy and Security Act 2009."  But this bill will not achieve any of it primary objectives. Instead, it will seriously reduce economic growth and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The following Table shows the source of energy (in quadrillion watts) on the left and where it was used. What you will not see is that electric power generation is the only a way to take fuel and deliver it to the users in a suitable formr. The upper part of the table shows fuels that are carbon based and which therefore emit CO2 including E85. The bottom half of the table shows fuels or sources which do not emit CO2. Clearly this country runs on carbon, almost 90%.

The next table shows what the Energy Information Agency (EIA) thinks that energy costs. (I did the best I could at getting this information properly classified.  And I'm confident that any errors of classification are not material).

Now since we have the units and the cots of energy in the same format we can determine unit costs and so  the next table shows what it costs to produce a Quad of energy (in billions of dollars per Quad).

What stands out is the very high cost of wind, solar PV ,and geothermal. But since the real focus today is "wind" power and that is the majority in that category, we'll assume that that row represents Wind Energy. 
The purpose of the House bill called Cap And Trade is to raise the price of carbon energy in the hopes of driving down the costs of wind generated power. That is not likely for a number of reasons,  so the net result will be a significant increase in the cost of energy. Remember, 90% of our energy is carbon based.  

Over the next few posts that I intend to place here, I will try to show that the move to wind is environmentally risky, will do little to slow the growth of CO2 emissions, and it will do nothing to improve our energy independence.

This is not a discussion on Global Warming it is a discussion on how to produce clean energy.

I'll give a clue as to why wind is risky. In 2050, the US Census bureau predicts there will be almost 420 million people in the US. And since we are planning a major overhaul of the energy sector, we must think in decades  and 2050 is therefore not all that far off.  So if nothing changes we will need at least another 40 Quad just to handle the extra 100 million people.  So assuming we can convert 17.7 Quad of electric power to wind and 9.9 Quad of the personal transportation fleet to an all or partial electric, we will need 27.67 Quad from wind power.

What would that, what would it cost, and what are thee hidden and serious environmental risk associated with it?. I've work it out already and I'll take you though the steps over the next couple of weeks.