Tilting at windmills

An editorial from the Early July 2013 North Woods Call

     Passing through Mackinaw City recently, we noticed a couple of new windmills that we hadn’t seen before towering above the trees on the outskirts of town.
     We’re all for clean energy, but we don’t think these rotating behemoths do anything to beautify the landscape—in the Straits area or elsewhere—and we’re beginning to wonder just who really benefits from these investments.
     We know a lot of the windmills we see sprouting up around the countryside are the result of crony capitalism, where tax dollars are used to subsidize the activities of politically chosen investors.  There’s probably good money in constructing them if you can get the state and federal grants.  But has anyone found that their electricity bills have gone down as a result of theoretically free wind energy?
      Ours haven’t—yet, at least.
       We’re just guessing here, but it seems like the billions of dollars spent on windmill farms and other “energy smart” alternatives to fossil fuels might better be spent retrofitting individual homes and businesses with wind and solar devices so that actual taxpaying citizens could directly benefit from cheap energy and not be billed monthly for it by some utility company.
     Call us impractical—and maybe we are—but an awful lot of money is being tossed into the wind under the guise of energy independence—even while many government-subsidized green energy companies go belly up due to poor management and lack of sustainable markets.
     Despite all this activity, few people that we know feel any more energy independent now than they did a few years ago.  In fact, it’s just the opposite.
     If only we did more careful thinking about such schemes before implementing them, we might all be better off.