Personal baggage is a great way to destroy a blog.

It all started with emails from John Locker Becki Gray. She did not ask me to attend the North Carolina Solar Center’s Public Forum on Wind Energy, but one had to wonder why else she would send the emails. I told Chad Adams I made a mean puppet when he first asked me to blog for the JLF, and the JLF has been superb about letting me do my own thing, so why this? It wouldn’t have bothered me if Becki hadn’t made a lot of left-wing arguments about protecting ridge tops and saving bats and birds imperiled by windmills.

I went anyway. After the meeting, I caught up with Daren Bakst and his sidekick from the JLF. Daren had just finished a Spotlight report that is not yet posted online. He plastered the joint with them. In spite of the left-wing arguments, the report raised some good points about only 1.5% of America’s petroleum consumption going to electricity. Everybody knows wind power is unreliable, but Bakst told of a Texas grid having to deprive customers of power due to slow winds. Because wind power is not dispatchable, grids have to idle on standby when the wind plants are supplying power to the grid.

I felt sorry for Daren as he lurked in the shadows outside the door. A person at the meeting had said that only Al Qaeda and the John Locke Foundation opposed wind power. So, I tried to strike up a conversation with all kinds of bad terrorist jokes. Daren wasn’t the only villain. A woman from Ashe County stood up to ask about ridge top protection. She was one of very few to challenge the general drift of the meeting. Daren said the crowd applauded when her exit from the room was announced. He found the crowd weird, lacking business sense. I thought they had been rather All-American compared to a typical Asheville gathering. It was no surprise to me that the event turned into a pro-Democrat campaign rally.

I gathered that the wind farms for WNC were just at the fantasy stage. The numbers presented were not identified as peak or average. Much more data needed to be gathered. Geotechnical analyses were needed, and nobody had even studied if the windy terrains were suitable for turbines and power lines. No feasibility study had been conducted.

After talking awhile, I went out to eat wit with the John Lockers. In the interest of full disclosure, I did not pay for my dinner. So, if I start talking like a JLF robot, whatever that is, you will know why.