Investor’s Business Daily posted an article today about alternative energy and what we need to do to make progress in the area of ‘green energy’.   Wind power in Spain has not been to solution that it was hoped to be.  Spain installed windmills to provide 10 percent of its energy, but because wind tends to be intermittent and unreliable, the windmills provide only about 1 percent to 3 percent of the country’s energy.  Instead of boosting the economy, the move to wind energy has cost jobs and created rising unemployment.  Britain has seen similar results in its attempt to ‘go green.’ 

According to the article:

“On this side of the pond, legislators are promoting “green” energy and jobs, via new mandates, standards, tax breaks and subsidies. However, the U.S. would need 180,000 1.5-megawatt wind turbines by 2020, just to generate the 600 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity needed to comply with the Waxman-Markey global warming bill, retired energy and nuclear engineering professor James Rust calculates.

“Erecting these forests of concrete and steel would require millions of acres of scenic, habitat and agricultural lands, and 126 million tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass and “rare earth” minerals for the turbines (700 tons per turbine); prodigious quantities of concrete, steel, copper and land for new transmission lines; and still more land, fuel and raw materials for backup gas-fired generators.”

I’m sure that most of us would like to see cleaner air and a more pristine planet, but I think we need to proceed with caution as we explore the idea of alternative energy.