Great article at the San Diego County, California East County Magazine:
WAS IT FRAUD? EXPERTS RAISE SERIOUS QUESTIONS AFTER LOW FIRST-YEAR ENERGY PRODUCTION AT OCOTILLO WIND PROJECT
An international wind energy expert has concluded that Pattern Energy appears to have defrauded the federal government in order to obtain lucrative tax subsidies for a wind energy development in southern California that has failed to live up to the developer’s claims.
“I believe we have a clear case for the False Claims Act,” Nicolas Boccard told East County Magazine, after reviewing full first-year wind production data for the Ocotillo Wind Energy Facility on U..S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public land. The project produced only about half of the energy that Pattern claimed it would produce—far below levels deemed viable for a wind project, a second expert confirms.
These dismal results are no surprise to Boccard, who predicted in a report written before construction of the project was completed that Ocotillo lacks sufficient wind speeds to sustain a viable wind energy project.
So were Pattern's lofty wind speed claims nothing more than spin?
Boccard, an international energy expert and assistant professor of economics at the University of Girona, Spain, has written and published in Energy Policy prior reports exposing exaggerated wind production claims made by energy companies in Europe. The Ocotillo report authored by Boccard was commissioned by the Desert Protective Council but its findings have since been independently validated by multiple experts.
Concerned tribal leaders, environmentalists and residents initially kept the Boccard report on Ocotillo confidential, but did share copies only with their public officials-- members of Congress and the Legislature, who failed to take action to prevent the project from being built—with one exception; one Congressman sent a letter to the U.S. Treasury Department asking that funds for the project be halted pending an investigation of wind speeds, but the agency failed to act. The other political leaders appear to have done nothing to investigate the fraud allegations before the project was built. Confronted with the year-end wind speed data, however, a second Congressional member has now taken action, asking the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate fraud claims.
It is fitting that the first researcher was from Spain. The Spanish Government spent about fifteen years seriously bankrolling alt-energy and concluded in 2009 that green energy was a unreachable myth and that government subsidies of development were a total waste. The 52 Page Report can be found here: Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources. A few bullet-points from their list of 24:
2. Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain's experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.
7. The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent € 571,138 to create each "green job", including subsidies of more than € 1 million per wind industry job.
8. The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every "green job" created.
10. Each "green" megawatt installed destroys 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro.
The article is a great read -- lots of data and citations to back it up.
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