People love wind power when they aren’t paying for it.
The Austin city council decided to “go green” and buy wind energy from West Texas and other sources. However, it was expensive, so they couldn’t swing it unless they made it voluntarily for environtally (but not economically) minded people.
A few signed up, but it only took a few months before the Austin utility started to go bust because of the expense of their wind power commitments vs the lack of willing customers.
So, what would any logical thinking person do?
Right.
They tried to make it mandatory for all customers to spread the high cost of wind energy around. Funny how that works.
We may not have a lot of fissionable material, but we’ve got a shitload of coal.
How expensive and why? In this case it sounds like someone was charging a city government a premium for social and political reasons. Electricity is just like any other commodity and people try to get as much as they can for it. Marketing it as Green CAN SOMETIMES earn a premium but usually not.