Another response to the "Danish" Wind Study

The American Wind Energy Association weighed in with general comments and an excellent point-by-point response to the "Danish" study on wind power, which I've blogged on here and here, as has my colleague Succar Samir.

As AWEA points out, the spin put on the study by Koch Industries-funded Institute for Energy Research, which is run by Thomas Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch, is more misleading than the study itself:

On September 14, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a fossil-fuel industry funded group, began distributing a collection of misleading and outright false claims about wind power in Denmark. These claims were presented in a study commissioned by IER and accompanying fact sheets which presented the study's conclusions in an even more misleading and false manner.

Note that the "accompanying fact sheet" is this one, produced by IER.

What's the big deal? IER is using the study to argue that the US cannot meet a signficant proportion of its energy needs because "Denmark has never met 20 percent of its power demand via wind."

As I've pointed out previously, the study notes that Denmark does generate the equivalent of 20% of its electricity demand with wind, (in fact, noting that in some parts, as much as 26%) but not all that electricity is used in Denmark. They sell some of it to neighboring countries.

So IER has seized on the fact that some of Denmark's wind-generated electricity is sold to other countries, one must wonder: would IER support a 20% renewable energy standard in the US - as long as we use it all ourselves?