Jess Zimmerman at Grist has the lowdown on how Gov. Scott Walker ruins things for wind energy, too.
Energy developer Invenergy has twigged to the fact that Walker is a scumbag in general and an anti-environment scumbag in particular, and has pulled out of its plan to build a new large-scale wind farm in Wisconsin. The farm would have had 100 turbines, 150 megawatts, and enough to power about 40,000 homes at peak output. But thanks to Walker's bill to kneecap wind energy by imposing tight restrictions on where turbine farms can be built, Invenergy now thinks Wisconsin has an "absence of legislative stability," which is corporate for "run by a dick." Another 725 megawatts of planned wind installations from other developers -- and $1.8 million in investments into the state economy -- is also at risk.
One of the biggest problems with developing alternative energy in the U.S. is regulatory uncertainty, and it's one of the things that the federal government could actually fix by setting nationwide standards and policies. States go it alone, and it means that potential efforts are too vulnerable to the vagaries of local politics.