MIT: Green Energy Can’t Work Unless You Tax Everything

The Daily Caller reports discusses renewable energy with Myron Ebell and William Yeatman.

“Windmills, solar panels, and ethanol could not compete with coal, natural gas, and oil without mandates and subsidies even when the price of the conventional fuels was relatively high,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Now that prices for fossil fuels have plummeted, very little new renewable energy capacity will be installed unless the mandates and the subsidies are raised even higher. The bankruptcy this week of Abengoa’s U. S. solar unit with up to $10 billion in debt is a sign of things to come.”

“Cheap gas is inimical to the green energy business (and all other competitors),” William Yeatman, an economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “But even if gas prices were through the roof, like in early 2008, intermittent wind and solar power still couldn’t compete without subsidies and mandates, for the simple reason that you can’t rely on them.”

Read the full article at the Daily Caller.