Nick Yates AU

I, Nick Yates, am going to make myself unpopular with the muses who exert their sometimes inexplicable influence over public opinion.

Specifically those muses behind the flights of fancy that now have us increasingly enamored, as a nation, with the idea of transferring our power grid out of the hands of carbon-based power technology and into those gearing up to profit from the production and maintenance of wind turban farms.  (Other muses hoping only to profitably invest their 401k savings in this might also take offense!)

Turns out that Denmark — which apparently leads the civilized world in such endeavors — has decidedly mixed feelings about the whole experience.  With twenty percent of their electricity now coming from wind, it seems Danes have grown melancholy over wind power’s shortcomings.  Winds don’t blow steadily;  They’re insensitive to diurnal peaks in power need;  Electricity thereby produced is expensive — if not impossible — to store in meaningful amounts for use when actually needed.

Add to that the fact that even in tiny Denmark, folks and their workplaces are often located inconveniently far from where winds blow.

Vastly larger America can expect to encounter these vexing problems on a proportionately larger scale.  So those of us contemplating feathering our retirement nests with investment profits made from the wind turban industry — might therefore pause to study the Danish experiment to date and what it likely bodes for wind power elsewhere.

And then there’re environmental concerns.  Not with climate change.  But with our propensity to agitate and sue over, for instance, our right to enjoy a power-tower-free view out our living room window!  Turns out, many of our nation’s windiest areas (beyond Capitol Hill, anyway)  are in the less densely populated Midwest, far from major urban centers.  That will require an awful lot of power transport towers to move electricity to where it’s needed — maybe even as many towers as we have lawyers to fight them.

Smart investors should therefore be ready to jump out of wind turban industry stocks well before reality hits and America moves embarrassedly on to the next fad.

Or perhaps park themselves now in nuclear power industry stocks and be ahead of the crowd.

Tags: Nick Yates, Wind Power Profits or Losses?