Enron's ghost, carried on the wind

As I read about the American Wind Energy Association's four-day annual conference this week in Houston, I was reminded of a conversation I had over lunch a few weeks ago with Robert Bradley.

Bradley is a 16-year veteran of Enron, seven of which he spent as a speech writer for Ken Lay. He now heads the Institute for Energy Research, which is affiliated with Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo.

As Bradley sees it, most of the "green energy" programs that are all the rage now date to initiatives supported by Enron.

Lay, he said, jumped on the global warming bandwagon in the late 1980s because it played into Enron's natural gas business. Likewise, he championed electricity deregulation and other alternative fuels such as wind power.

Lay's strategy, Bradley said, was to get government to create lucrative markets that Enron could dominate, while dressing them up with a combination of environmentalism and capitalism.

He sees the same thing happening with the clamor for wind power.

We find the idea of wind power appealing. It seems natural and clean. Windmills, after all, are part of our pastoral vision of Americana -- power, nostalgia and patriotism all rolled into one. What's not to like?

Only the economics. If the government didn't intervene, more economical strategies for reducing emissions would develop, Bradley argues. Coal plants would be retrofitted with devices to capture carbon or we'd reduce the number of older model cars on the road, for example.

Instead, thanks to state-sponsored initiatives for alternative energy, backed by Enron in the late 1990s, Texas consumers who are already paying some of the nation's highest electric bills are being asked to pony up billions for transmission lines to bring wind-generated power eastward.

You can read more about Bradley's views on how Enron got the government to further its wind agenda in this paper.

This week's conference is "an astounding example of what government intervention can do -- create a whole, parasitic industry," Bradley said. "Wind technologies actually predate fossil fuels and have been experimental and uncompetitive in electricity generation for over a century."

Is wind power a viable alternative? Or is it just the greening of corporate welfare?