That is, in the list of how to be serious, Big Coal does that because it has to. It is fully committed to being Serious^(TM), because if the WeSaySoInc tactics fall over, they are dead companies walking.

OTOH, no matter how much wind power companies engage in WeSaySoInc tactics ... its always suspect that they are having the Serious People^(TM) on, because they can pretty much at the drop of a hat switch to being forward looking and progressive and relying on actual economic cost versus benefit as opposed to free riding economic costs to make financial costs look good.

Their loyalty to Serious People^(TM) is suspect for good reason: they have a real future, and while they could well act like perfectly respectable corporate psychopaths, their long term survival does not rest on acting like perfectly respectable corporate psychopaths.

The flip side of not being all-in to a Serious People^(TM) strategy is that they are in a position to play both sides of the street. And indeed, the complaints from the Dirty Fucking Hippies about "utility scale wind turbines are a conspiracy to maintain corporate power in energy markets in the face of Peak Oil" (true story ... just hunt in the eighty or so comments in my Agent Orange diary) can be useful, here: they should be answered, honestly, in the forums they occur, but also quoted when around Serious People^(TM).


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

1. it is getting seriously big (a typical offshore wind farm is an investment above one billion euros, and current European plans will have ten of these built each year for the next 20 years...)
   
2. it is expensive, being a capital intensive industry;
   
3. it had economies of scale and making large, industrially-managed series has real value
   
4. the sneering will probably happen soon...
   
5. no violence, for now

The state cannot impose a rate above avoided cost, and as presently interpreted, that rules out a life of project rate guarantee.

Only a small change would be required to permit states to adopt competitive feed-in tariffs, which would leave tax credits or portfolio standards for pushing the scale of various sustainable renewable power sources up to cost competitive levels.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.