Coming soon to America’s fruited plains and atop the purple mountains majesty: a lot of 100-foot-tall windmills.
Buried in the energy bill that surfaced this week from a House-Senate conference committee is almost $3 billion in subsidies that supporters have earmarked to build thousands of electricity-generating windmills in the United States.
Advocates say windmills are a simple, cheap and pollution-free way of providing energy without burning $60-a-barrel oil or natural gas imported from unstable regions of the world. They are more capital expensive to install than natural-gas power plants but, after they are up and running, require only occasional oiling to keep working and often can be fixed by someone sitting in an office with a laptop computer.
Journal Gazette
