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GUEST: John Farrell, Research Associate at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and author of the report, Wind and Ethanol: Economies and Diseconomies of Scale

Last Saturday the US House of Representatives passed its version of an energy bill that has a potentially ground-breaking requirement – that the nation’s utilities get 15% of their power from renewable sources such as the wind and sun by 2020. Although renewable energy was not in the Senate’s version of the bill, 50 senators sent a letter to energy committee leaders in April expressing support for it. But before environmentalists begin celebrating, it’s important to note that most Congress members favor large-scale facilities with the idea that bigger is better. A new study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance says bigger is not better. While there are indeed small cost reductions from very large scale, absentee owned renewable energy facilities, these are overshadowed by the significant loss in potential economic benefits from locally owned and more modestly scaled facilities.

Download the Report here: www.newrules.org/de/scalereport.pdf