Restore common sense and fairness to energy and agricultural policy by removing the corporate welfare that has propped up substandard energy sources for far too long.
Thanks to the dizzying array of renewable energy carve-outs that litter our tax code, taxpayers are forced to underwrite generous "green energy" giveaways, allowing power companies to effectively tap the public treasury to subsidize unreliable wind and solar farms. As a result, prime agricultural land is often taken out of production, posing a long-term threat to America’s ability to feed the world.
Industrial solar and wind facilities are land-hungry ways to generate electricity that often fail to show up when we need them most. It takes approximately 8 acres of land per megawatt of installed solar capacity and an average of 106 acres per megawatt of wind energy. While it is possible to “farm around” wind turbines, this is not possible with solar panels.
This means increasing our reliance on unreliable wind and solar energy will consume enormous quantities of land while paradoxically making us more reliant on foreign countries for the power we need to heat our homes and run our factories. In fact, the amount of land needed to deploy intermittent wind and solar resources is even more considerable when one accounts for the low productivity relative to other energy sources.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, solar panels in Wisconsin produced just 16% of their potential output in 2020, and wind turbines produced 27.5% of theirs. In other words, the vast majority of the time, Wisconsinites still rely on electricity generation sources that actually work persistently, such as coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, and natural gas.
Further, EIA data reveal that Wisconsin uses 7,014 MW of electricity, on average, every hour of the year. Therefore, it would require a whopping 350,700 acres of solar panels, or 2.6 million acres of wind turbines, to get that much power generation after accounting for the low production of wind turbines and solar panels. Yet, the average farm size in Wisconsin is 222 acres. This means generating 7,104 MW of solar on average every hour of the year would require the land equivalent of 1,579 Wisconsin farms.
That’s why we are working to enact the Future Agriculture Retention and Management or FARM Act, which would get taxpayers out of the business of transforming actual farms into wind and solar farms.
To read more, go to: Halt subsidies for sacrificing farmland to the green energy industry
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