Windmills? They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes. Yet, the environmentalists love the windmills. I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills. I had them way down. The windmills are the most expensive energy you can have, and they don’t work. They last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place nobody ever takes them down. They just go onto the next piece of prairie or land and destroy that. It’s incredible.
This diatribe is meaningless without a comparison to an alternative and its trade offs.
I believe this is a direct quote from our former president
Also we have newer ways of processing grain -- so windmills are really not the solution they were 100 or 200 years ago. Most of them are made of wood though -- so they are pretty eco when they decay.
As with all industries when you pull away subsidies their business models either adapt or they die off. In this case, it'll definitely result in a die off of some wind turbine manufacturers and wind farm projects but over all it's better than keeping the thumb on the scale. Also, this is doubly true with respect to the petroleum industry. The US continues to prop up oil companies via subsidies and various tax evading credits. If a similar attitude was taken with oil with the removal of such thumb-on-the-scale subsidies then we'd see a massive die off of oil companies across the board. Frankly, if this is was done I suspect all renewables would look far better to investors than oil does.