The American Spectator : The Next Subprime Mortgage Meltdown

Last week we passed a landmark when Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam, announced she was giving up plans to open The Stud Farm, Nevada's first male brothel. Instead, she is putting her money into alternate energy.

"It's where the money is," she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "It's the wave of the future."

Jesse Ausubel, director of the Center for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, takes the opposite view. "Alternate energy is the next subprime mortgage meltdown," he says. When Heidi Fleiss has jumped in, we may be reaching the top of the market.
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What's happening with alternate energy is the same thing. Governments have assumed that windmills, solar collectors, and biofuels are the wave of the future. Therefore the only logical course is to hasten that future by subsidizing it and forcing utilities to adopt it ahead of schedule. What's lost in this is that windmills are producing almost no useful electricity and will become a huge drag on the economy -- just as biofuels have done nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and have just led to hundreds of millions in wasted investments.
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What makes windmills even more impractical is that, because of their vast land requirements (125 square miles to match the average coal or nuclear plant), they must be located far from population centers. That's why as soon as Gore or Friedman finishing painting a world run on wind and sunshine they tell you we have be rebuild the entire national grid in order to accommodate them. The current 345-kilovolt current grid, you see, loses about 10 percent of its power to heat and friction every 200 miles. What we need are 765 kV transmission lines that can carry electricity from remote Midwestern farmlands and East Coast mountaintops to cities around the country without too much loss. The cost of that will easily exceed $1 trillion.
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Cheer up. Ten years from now there's going to be a great business in tearing down 45-story windmills and selling them for scrap. That'll create a lot of jobs and stimulate the economy.