Marshall Institute attacks wind energy, ignores facts

The report’s authors incorrectly claim that the wind industry has failed to achieve the “30% decrease in costs predicted by the learning curve,” as the industry doubled its installed capacity. However, the Marshall Institute report only looked at wind energy cost trends for the period 2001-2008. Before releasing their final report in December 2012, the authors should have consulted a February 2012 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory entitled “Recent Developments in the Levelized Cost of Energy from U.S. Wind Power Projects.”

Had they done so, they would have learned that the current cost of wind energy “is estimated to be as much as ~24% and ~39% lower than the previous low in 2002-2003,” a result exactly in line with the 30% decrease in costs that the authors had indicated should be expected. (http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/wind-energy-costs-2-2012.pdf, slide 41) Any energy analyst knows that up-to-date data is essential in the energy industry, given the propensity for rapid changes in fuel prices and changes in technology. Instead, the authors wasted 45 pages of fancy math on data that was more than four years old, in a wonderful example of the maxim “garbage in, garbage out.”

For more background on the long-running smear campaign against wind power and other clean energy sources, see Fight Clean Energy Smears.