Bob Grant, chief executive of wind energy producer Pacific Hydro, ("All energy industries depend on crutch", Australian Financial Review, November 15) maintains that wind power to be viable needs only the sort of government support that he says conventional fuels have enjoyed.
Although Australian governments nationalised electricity generation, it is difficult to think of any industry anywhere in the world that owes its existence to government support. Oddly, one of the Australian support mechanisms that he cites is the absence of taxes on diesel fuel and liquefied petroleum gas.
Wind is taxless throughout the world and few people object to this -- what is less palatable is the subsidy that allows wind power to get double the price of conventionally generated electricity.
Not only is wind expensive and likely to remain so, but it is so irregular that each wind farm needs to be duplicated with conventional back-up facilities if reliability is to be maintained.
Wind power can lay any claims to viability only in a world where carbon taxes double the price of conventional electricity. Even then, wind cannot come close to nuclear, its rival carbon-free source of generation.
Grant applauds the Victorian government for its proposal to subsidise wind power in order to deliver "enormous employment benefits". Why not subsidise clothing manufactures or computer-chip industries instead?
The reason is that even if such winner-picking policies create jobs in the target industries, their funding brings greater adverse impacts in all other industries.
The Hawke government embarked on a process of ridding Australia of these sorts of industry policies.
In doing so, it and subsequent governments removed a deadweight from the economy which has done much to bring the increased prosperity we have enjoyed over the past two decades. Reinventing totally discredited industry policies and wrapping them in a green cloak will take the economy backwards.
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