Wind Power: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

An 1883 article in Scientific American noted that one of the main problems with wind power is “gathering it at the time we do not need it and preserving it till we do.” In other words, there was no way to economically and reliably store the electricity generated from windmills.

Today, 134 years later, after having moved from windmills to wind turbines and after billions of dollars of investments–much of which has been forcibly extracted from taxpayers (through subsidies) and consumers (through mandates), we are still in the same position.

Everyone promises that the battery or other technology we need to economically store electricity in order to correct for wind’s intermittency is just around the corner. However, we’ve been turning the same corner for centuries, and we don’t seem to be getting any closer to overcoming wind’s inability to reliably provide affordable electricity.