Ending corporate welfare for the Big Wind industry -- Billions of taxpayer dollars are blowing in the wind -- By thomas Pyle, The Washington Times

(Illustration by Greg Groesch, The Washington Times)

In Washington's world of special interests, the wind industry stands out among the most persistent.

Over the past 20 years, its lobbyists have secured billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for multinational wind companies that claim to represent a nascent industry on the cusp of economic competitiveness.

The Senate Finance Committee now wants to keep the spigot of federal money flowing. On April 3, the committee voted to include an extension to the Production Tax Credit (PTC) in its tax extenders package. The PTC, which expired on Dec. 31, is a lucrative subsidy that provides wind developers a 2.3-cent tax credit per kilowatt hour of electricity produced over a 10-year period. This adds up quickly, with the wind industry receiving $1.3 billion in 2012 alone.

The PTC is a solution in search of a problem. Originally included in the Energy Policy Act of 1992, the PTC was intended by Congress to kick-start renewable-energy development. Since then, Congress has renewed the PTC multiple times and increased its value on multiple occasions.

The PTC has outlived any purpose it may have once had. Wind generation has grown by nearly 5,000 percent since the PTC's inception. In 1992, wind installations produced 2,887,523 megawatt hours of electricity. In 2013, the wind industry produced 167,665,000 megawatt hours of electricity.

In other words, Big Wind is doing just fine.

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