I lived in Germany for fifteen years. One of the tax credit possibilities that I looked into....was the investment capital deal with windmills. There are very few tax credits that you can take....but wind energy was one of them.
So I looked into this. You’d have to join up with a syndicate and be member of their group. You’d have to grasp that there is a fair amount of investment involved, with a yearly income that goes mostly to pay for the installation costs and yearly maintenance fees. If you were lucky, you might get three to four percent of what you invested....back each year. Their hope was....electrical costs would eventually go up and that you’d start to clear seven percent a year in ten years....so this was a long-term investment deal. Because there were either no taxes or limited taxes on this deal....it was an enticement. But it might take twenty years to get back what you invested into this deal, and the life-span of the windmill....was always a question in my mind. They hinted of forty years, but no one could say absolutely on that fact.
The final observation I often made while living in Germany....was that you’d often see these windmills hit by lightning. Naturally, they’d go down for maintenance, and some guy would come out to fix something. So this repair probably came out of the general care fund, and nobody ever noted how much or how often this would occur.
Bump
Similar to the long-standing Production Tax Credit (PTC) for utility scale wind vs. the Cash Grant program under Obama's Stimulus. The tax credit is production based, resulting in wind farms where the wind blows and improved turbine performance over the past decade. Whereas the cash grant simply provides a rebate of 30% of the installed cost, in lieu of the PTC, which helps make the economics "work" (time value of money) for projects in low wind that would otherwise not get built - it truly subsidizes bad projects.
And it came out of Obama's Stimulus... shocking.
“To be eligible for rebates, customers didn’t need to prove that the wind actually blows enough to justify installing a turbine on their property.”
I’m confused. What does generating power have to do with Green Energy? I mean, they’re installing solar arrays in England...
Of all liberal ideas, putting windmills on the grid is one of the dumbest. Every potential watt of wind power must be backed up by conventional power plants, always ready to go when the wind doesn’t blow.
The Europeans experience with wind farms should be instructive. Their programs have been largely failures. But that doesn’t matter to the left. They just push ahead with their green energy stupidity. The Europeans have not been able to take even one conventional power plant offline.
I live in N Nevada. There have been a number of Geothermal wells dug north of me, along I-80. We were told over the past 3 years that they were digging the wells, then planned to connect them with piping, then build a bower plant in that area.
It was announced last week that there will be NO power plant. No piping has yet appeared.
Today, it was announced that the BLM has given permission to probe for Geothermal well sites east of Fallon......EAST of Fallon is the Naval Air Station!!!
I don’t know if this is another “Solyndra” in action.