THE LION THAT BEEPED

As we have pointed out before, wind power has its place, especially for small amounts of power in remote locations where it would be too costly to bring in the power by transmission lines. Typically, windmills are well suited for powering the lights and foghorns of an offshore oil platform.

For the rest, just look at those figures again. $7.1 million for a monster on a 150 ft tower to give a crummy 1.5 MW, barely enough to power about 500 homes. The investment is an astronomical $4,733 per installed kW, about 10 times that for a conventional power plant.

That in itself need not be bad; research is always expensive. What is bad is the PR barrage by the mice that roar about this lion that beeps. ERDA is reported to have claimed that it is designed "to test the feasibility of wind energy in meeting the nation's fuel shortage," and Business Week quotes, or more probably misquotes, a Lockheed spokesman as saying that by 1995 "wind energy can supply almost 19% of the electric power demand."

Will somebody please lend a pocket calculator to the bird-brained boys of Business Week? To attain 19% of even the present generating capacity (let alone that expected in 1995), and even if the wind blew at 18 mph everywhere all the time, you would need 63,333 of these beeping lions windmills here, windmills there, here mills, there mills, everywhere windmills, Business Week is going nuts, eea, eea, yo.

Capital costs? Wind availability? Land use? Of the hundreds of obstacles, one is surely insurmountable: All those environmentalists, almost as numerous as the needed windmills, who now preach replacement of fossils and nuclear by wind and solar, will never stand for the visual pollution; they don't believe figures, but they may believe their eyes.

Of course, Business Week, which has been consistently anti-nuclear and has extolled Commoner's Marxist prescriptions for the energy crisis as "heady stuff," should not be expected to understand technology. Their real expertise lies in business matters: The price of windmills, they report, may be less than that of the electricity produced "if ERDA can come up with a system that can generate power for 20 cents per kWh."

20 cents per kilowatt-hour! Not even the social engineers who bankrupted New York City and gave it the highest electric rates in the country have yet managed to drive the cost of electric power, taxes and all, that high.

It could be done, though. By studding those 250 ft beeping lions with diamonds and entrusting their management to Business Week.