2012 WTF #18 – Only in America!  The government forces green energy on the populace then takes it away and either way the people get screwed!

Wind farms in the Pacific Northwest – built with government subsidies and maintained with tax credits for every megawatt produced – are now getting paid to shut down as the federal agency charged with managing the region’s electricity grid says there’s an oversupply of renewable power at certain times of the year.  Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency based in Portland, Ore., shut down the wind farms for nearly 200 hours over 38 days and is offering to compensate wind companies for HALF their lost revenue (appx $50 million a year.)

SO… how will the electricity producers make up the other half of the lost revenue?  You guessed it, they will be looking for rate payers to make up the difference – but heck, they require taxpayers to subsidize the production of renewable energy – even though they have to pay for it as a rate payer to get the electricity; now they want rate payers to pay renewable energy companies when they lose money as well.

Looks like they have them coming and going, with the only people “winning” being the electric company who is guaranteed to not lose money and the govt who gets to hand off the requirement to pay half the money owed to the people while still making them pay the full taxes needed to subsidize the entire thing.

Yea, that seems right to me.
http://www.q13fox.com/news/kcpq-pacific-northwest-wind-farms-paid-to-not-produce-20120308,0,190781.story