The Realities of 'Green Energy' - Newsweek

By unleashing human ingenuity, the world can solve its energy woes. Wind power won't do it.

To power the future, many commentators today exhort us to buy lots of “green energy”—chiefly solar panels and wind turbines. They claim this is a way to avoid running out of fossil fuel, to create “green jobs” and greater energy security, and to respond to global warming. However, these arguments mostly fail on closer inspection.
...
However, when politicians promise green jobs by making everyone pay more for energy, it means that higher prices destroy a similar number of jobs elsewhere. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared in 2009 that “in the U.S. there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry.” Hardly something to be proud about, since this would indicate that jobs in the wind industry, which produce 0.5 percent of America’s electricity, are 50 times less productive than those in the coal industry, which produce half the nation’s electricity.