Dandelion?
Last Post 28 Mar 2018 10:13 PM by Dana1. 47 Replies.
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jonrUser is Offline
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28 Jul 2017 05:47 PM
Sticking two round pipes down a round hole is inefficient - a single pipe with a center divider would waste less space. Or maybe horizontal loops are the way to go for most customers.
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29 Jul 2017 06:46 PM
It all depends on the area where it's being implemented.
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01 Aug 2017 04:17 AM
Posted By Dilettante on 28 Jul 2017 04:29 PM
Posted By docjenser on 28 Jul 2017 04:12 AM
Posted By Dana1 on 27 Jul 2017 06:33 PM
Most home heating is achieved by much cheaper energy than retail electricity at a COP of 1. To use a dumb BTU multiplier implies otherwise.


The new paradigm to account costs is not $$$ but emissions. What matters is how much renewable energy can I deliver for each $ spend.To burn anything to heat a house will soon be as obsolete as sending an electric current through a wire to enlighten a room, e.g. an incandescent light ball. It will happen partially by carrot, and partially by stick. E.g. partially by economics, and partially by public policy.
Posted By Dana1 on 26 Jul 2017 07:41 PM
Solar City had favorable financing for outright purchase too, but have a fairly high customer acquisition cost, the marketing & sales costs per customer. They also invested a lot in PV panel manufacturing to become a more vertically integrated company and to have an assured supply chain as the grew, something that was looked upon less favorably by most analysts. Smaller regional & local solar installers have better margins, despite higher cost for the hardware itself.



I do like this analogy to solar city. The managing and planning costs per install will be even greater, due to the individual complexity of the install in comparison to a relatively simple solar system.

Doc, you contradict yourself here.

First you say "Not dollars, but emissions".  True up to a certain point.

Then you say what matters is how much renewable energy you can deliver for each dollar you spend.

As for your assertion that burning anything will be obsolete.

Doubtful.  Small, high efficiency wood/pellet stoves are still dirt cheap   And depending on where you live and the amount of space you need to heat, wood and wood byproducts (pellets, fire logs, etc) are plentiful and inexpensive.


True with the contradiction. Currently the power at be have limited resources to fight emission. Thus they look at where they move the needle the most in terms of emissions with the least amount of $$$. Specifically wether further investment into solar PV makes more sense, or if some of the limited money would not be better spend with other technologies. But things are changing, and new ways of fundings become available and new programs are developed.
Again, it is not whether something is dirt-cheap but how polluting it is which will matter in the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/us/alaskans-cost-of-staying-warm-a-thick-coat-of-dirty-air.html
Another example was that coal used to be the cheapest way to make electricity, but more and more regulations were put inlace to have coal either replaced with cleaner natural gas as a bridge technology, or by renewables. It certainly accelerated the process further that gas and renewables also became a cheaper fuel compared to coal. But coal was initially targeted by emissions. Our quality of life gets more and more effected. The economic impact of the pollution is getting so high that it does not matter how cheap the fuel is, or how plentiful it is.
https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2016-12-19/plants-closed-cars-stopped-as-china-faces-smog-red-alert
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Dana1User is Offline
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01 Aug 2017 09:35 PM
The amount of biomass one can burn for heat or electricity without major environmental issues is similarly bad or worse than high-sulfur coal, and without sustainable forestry/agricultural methods the net impact on the environment could be worse than global warming. The best thing you can say about biomass is that it serves as a long term energy storage medium, but when trees & residues are burned solely for electricity at 25-30% thermal efficiency it's worse than burning natural gas even from a net carbon perspective. It would be better from a climate change perspective to let those residues return to the soil as sequestered carbon. But burned in a pellet stove or wood stove at 60%+ efficiency it can still be much better than neutral from a carbon perspective, as long as sustainable forestry practices are used. For most urban areas even the cleanest wood burning appliances become a real air pollution hazard if more than a few percent of the heating BTUs in the neighborhood are being supplied by wood. It can be a personal carbon solution for the few, but it's not going to be a major part of the energy or carbon emissions solution.

The 1952 killer smog event in London was really the beginning of the end for coal, but history is almost (but won't quite be) repeating itself in parts of China, and in New Delhi, India, which now ranks as the worst air-pollution city in the world. Getting rid of liquid fueled transportation in New Delhi would have net positive effect on local air pollution, even if it were EVs charged by their largely coal-fired grid. Internal combustion engine cars & trucks won't be legal to sell in India starting in 2030, and the current administration has VERY ambitious goals for expanding the generation capacity with renewables, since renewables won't compete with agriculture for seasonally scarce water resources the way thermal coal and thermal nuclear do, and are already cost competitive with thermal coal & nuclear even under India's less stringent (than the EU or US) air pollution standards. Even as electricity use rises in the developing world, coal burning for electricity in those countries will largely be flat to falling in the next decade.

In the US the cost/kwh of the sulfur & MATS abatement for coal burning is still pretty small, and has only a minor effect on the economics of coal (protestations from the Koch brothers et al notwithstanding). Innovation in gas extraction technology and the ensuing glut of cheap gas put the next-to-the-last stake in the business of burning coal for electricity, followed in rapid succession by the rise of zero marginal cost renewables in formerly high coal-burning regions, which has the twin effects of reducing the capacity factors of fossil burners, and suppressing wholesale electricity prices. (The same effects are putting existing nukes out of business too.) On a levelized cost basis even without subsidy wind power is now even cheaper than combined cycle natural gas in some of the high wind capacity factor areas, but even that will be overtaken by falling PV solar within the next decade. Wind alone is providing a double-digit percentage of the power going onto the grid in something like a dozen states now, including a bunch of "red" states such as TX, OK, ND, KS, and ID, and the trend is continuing to spread as costs fall and wind capacity factors rise.

By 2030 the cheapest energy of any type anywhere (even the arctic circle) on a levelized cost basis will be PV, but running major energy grids solely by PV won't be the cheapest. Some amount of transmission grid infrastructure and some amount of storage will be necessary, but the amount of storage required isn't as much as most analysts were thinking even five years ago, and the cost over-building PV capacity and curtailing a sizable fraction may be cheaper than building out more storage. There are many moving parts to the puzzle, and what it will take to get to 100% renewables most cheaply is turning into a food fight among academic circles. (The first 80% is mostly agreed upon, which must mean it's wrong! :-) ) Battery technology has proven to have a complex but even more rapid learning curve than PV (which is still on a hot learning curve itself!): http://reneweconomy.com.au/study-finds-storage-prices-falling-faster-pv-wind-technologies-74360/

Food fights or not, cheap renewables (for nearly all energy uses) is the wave of the near & intermediate term future. Whether cheap GSHP ala Dandelion has a major role to play in that remains to be seen, but heat pumps of all types are going to play a role for space heating and other low-temp heat applications, along with boring old stuff like air sealing and insulation.
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07 Aug 2017 04:54 PM
Went to the Dandelion site and filled out the information form requesting contact to solicit further information.

Got a phone call from California the following day asking when I can meet a "representative" to examine my property and my existing HVAC.

Explained I was an engineer and could answer any question regarding the existing HVAC; property information could be viewed online.

I've heard nothing but crickets since then; it has been 6 calendar days.

My "opinion" is this is an attempt to capitalize on an opportunity similar to Musk's Solar City through the use of financing. I would love to see a proposal from Dandelion on what they can install and finance to provide Heating in my home.

I seriously doubt I will hear back from their Burbank, California office.
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07 Aug 2017 06:52 PM
I live close to an area with a huge wind farm. They installed most of those turbines about 15 years ago. This year they came in and replaced all the blades, gear boxes, and maybe even the generators. They cut those long blades into pieces and are hauling them off somewhere. I assume they will fill a landfill or ten somewhere. I see the gear boxes all stacked up by the railroad. I guess they will be sent off for a complete rebuild. So I got to reading up on these things. I found that most of the time when the wind blows there is such an over amount of power, that they are actually selling power for a negative amount, just to get the 2.3 cents per KW subsidy. But when the wind is not blowing, they have to pay extra for power because the grid generators have to be brought back on line, which is not efficient.

If I am doing the math correctly, the most they could make at .10 cents per KW from a 2MW turbine is about 200 bucks a day, and when selling at a negative amount maybe 75 bucks a day. Even at the highest amount that only adds up to about a million bucks in 15 years. Now if these turbines cost 4 million a piece, and have to be completely rebuilt every 15 years, how can that pay out? Even if the rebuild is only a million bucks, it wouldn't break even if you got top dollar for every KW. And even though the initial investment was government subsidized by as much as 60%, they will still never reach a pay off.

The only ones I found that are even close to paying off are in countries where they pay 70 cents per KW, plus 60% of their really high tax rate also goes to electric production subsidies. Then they still have the problem of what to do when the wind is not blowing. I see where one is trying to build a 50MW battery, but how long will that last? Seeing those wind turbines may make us feel like we are "being green". But I am afraid that maintenance, replacement parts, transportation, and labor are costing more and using more energy than a wind turbine can produce in its lifetime.

That is not even considering the cost of those huge transmission lines or factoring in the amount of power that is lost over long distances. I just can't make it add up to anything except an energy negative concept. What am I missing here? Maybe I should call Dandelion or Solar City, as they seem to be able to make energy negative work if you have good enough credit.
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07 Aug 2017 07:52 PM
Valveman: I'll take Lazard's math on this over yours- no offense. Really- they have an army of serious analysts using real data on real projects, with plenty of insight as to the full lifecycle costs. Industry financial analysts also know when it's economic to re-power existing wind farms as newer technology crosses performance & cost thresholds, as happened at the project near you.

See the table on p.2 (p.3 in PDF pagination) of their most recent levelized cost document:

https://www.lazard.com/media/438038/levelized-cost-of-energy-v100.pdf

Bloomberg New Energy Finance has similar numbers, and like Lazard they are paid (by folks betting serious money) to be sure their numbers are in the right range.

Wind power never needs to produce power at negative pricing- it's easily curtailed and just as easily re-started when the LMP goes back into positive territory.

The levelized cost of utility scale wind power (especially in the American midwest) is now cheaper than a new coal plant, even without the production tax credit.

The efficiency hit from ramping/load-following with a combined cycle gas plant isn't very much at all, even on a cold re-start. It's nothing like the hit taken when load-following thermal coal, or nuclear power. But the hit in capacity factor (the average duty cycle relative to it's maximum possible output) for combined cycle gas with increasing renewables raises it's levelized cost, but they're still making plenty of money at a 50% capacity factor, where nukes & coal will have long since gone broke. Only when variable output renewables become a large fraction of the total does it put serious financial pressure on CC gas operators.

Transmission cost vs. storage costs vs. curtailment cost predictions are all being thrown around in academic food-fights on the subject, but the hard truth is that storage costs and renewables costs are continuing on relentless and rapid cost reduction learning curves, which will pretty much put inflexible generators out of business, unless the inflexible generator has an adequate storage capacity. This has been a known problem for several decades. When planning for the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California was still on the drawing table, they planned for and built an appropriatlely sized pumped hydro storage facility to deal with the expected (and realized, after it was built) overnight power surplus. And that was with a totally dumb grid. With a smarter grid and distributed resources (like smart electric car chargers that will top up any time the price drops to some low number) dealing with the windy-day excess doesn't necessarily need more transmission grid infrastructure to avoid curtailment. Making things like that happen is a matter of adjusting electricity market regulations, it's not a technical hurdle.

And avoiding curtailment and negative wholesale pricing is only half the market problem- peak power pricing can and will be moderated by more intelligent demand response mechanisms still being worked out in many markets, but is required to be alllowed to play in the wholesale electricity and capacity markets per FERC Order 745. FERC Order 745 has only begun to have an effect, since it was delayed by legal wrangling. In the ISO New England region the demand response market won't even begin until June of next year, but by 2020 it's effects should be pretty strong, as it already has been in the PJM grid region. In the PJM region it's possible for homeowners with electric water heaters to subscribe to a distributed resource aggregator to do this automatically, operating as a "virtual power plant", but a powerplant with negative output. At times of negative pricing the aggregator can be paid to add load (your water heater, and a million others) to avoid negative pricing and to keep the grid stable. They can also fine tune the load to achieve frequency and voltage control, much in the same way as (but faster than) a peaking gas plant. Even one-way power flow smart car chargers can provide the same grid services, and in a competitive market the costs to the ratepayers will drop. An example of such aggregator using smart water heater controllers is Mosaic Power: https://mosaicpower.com/how-it-works/
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07 Aug 2017 09:55 PM
Thanks for that link, and I will study it more. But after the first read I see that "unsubsidized wind" is fairly equal to "gas combined cycle". So why are we still subsidizing wind? Warren Buffet said wind power doesn't pay without the government subsidies. I personally cannot make the amount of energy produced by a wind turbine show to ever pay off the overall expenses. I am as skeptical of these numbers as I am of the temperature recordings from the Global Warming crowd. I see good numbers from those who profit in someway from wind energy, and I am sure "financial advisory and asset management" companies profit from them as well. It is much harder to find information from people who do not profit in someway. But there seems to be drastically different conclusions from the two groups.
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08 Aug 2017 04:49 AM
> at .10 cents per KW from a 2MW turbine is about 200 bucks a day,

I get 2000*.10*24 = $4800/day
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08 Aug 2017 01:04 PM
Thanks for that. I forgot the last 24. That makes it much better. But then you have to figure that the wind only blows the right speed to turn the turbine 18% to 25% of the time. That would be 1200 bucks per day. So it would take about 10 years to payoff a $4M turbine. But I found one article that shows wind energy in Texas has gone for as little as negative $8.52 a MWH. Considering the government subsidy is $23 per MWH, that would be a net of about $15 a MWH. So again considering the wind only blows 25% of the time, that would be $180 per day, which is $65,700 per year. Now that will take 60 years to pay off a $4M turbine. I assume the real number is somewhere between 10 and 60 years. But even if you figure on the low side, like 20 years, then it still takes more to payoff a turbine than they can produce. If you consider the subsidy that pays for 60% of the initial investment and $23 a MWH after taxes as part of the electric bill, wind energy is already double or triple the current price. Double or triple the price of electricity is OK if it reduces emissions. But I think it is hard to quantify the emissions produced from manufacturing and maintaining a wind turbine.
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08 Aug 2017 05:21 PM
As Dana said, I'd use Lazards's figures. But the renewable figures need to add some amount of storage costs and load response incentives to be practical on a large scale. And the fossil fuel based costs should be increased to account for environmental, social and health effects. What the US spent on middle east wars could have provided massive amounts of solar, wind and storage. Whoops - getting political.
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08 Aug 2017 07:06 PM
As a business owner, if I can buy a machine for $4M that makes 2000 parts and hour, and I can sell those parts for 10 cents a piece ($4,800 per day), I would have a payoff of 2.2 years. But even though the fuel is free, if I can only get it for 25% of a day, that increases my pay off time to 9.1 years. Now because everybody gets fuel the same 25% of the time, that creates a glut on the market and the price goes down. So now if I have to sell my parts for 2 cents a piece, it would take 45 years to reach a pay off on a piece of equipment that only last 15 years. I couldn't even consider selling parts for a negative amount, like -8.52 per MW, as that would just add to my expenses. That is not even considering storage or load response costs. Without subsidies, I just don't see this being a viable alternative until the price of electricity triples, which I guess is the whole idea.
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08 Aug 2017 10:51 PM
Thing is, there's so much more to calculating turbine output than simply KW*24*cents.

Duration of wind has been addressed.
Also important is wind speed. At or below 10mph, most turbines aren't going to generate any appreciable power. At 12mph, you're probably generating at about 70% of your rating. And above 25mph, most turbines will shut down to avoid damage. So optimal range is probably 15-20mph.
Also, height of the tower matters too for hitting air that's moving at the optimal speeds. Especially if you have tree coverage in the area.
The physics of the blade itself are also important.

As such, wind power REALLY needs to be considered only after you've properly surveyed and assessed the site.

Because it'd really SUCK to spend out big bucks on a turbine and then find out your site's conditions (and your equipment choices) mean that you simply won't produce power.
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09 Aug 2017 11:58 AM
I drove through Oklahoma a few weeks ago, middle of the day on a bright clear warm day. I went through an area where I could see hundreds of wind turbines - both sides of the road for as far as I could see. I did not see a single turbine turning. That seemed kinda odd to me, but maybe not.
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09 Aug 2017 02:01 PM
I hope someone is doing the wind analysis before they install whole fields of those things. But I see them sitting idle a lot myself. If you have seen one of those huge wind farms like covers a big chunk of central Texas, it makes you wonder how much of the earth must be covered with wind turbines to be of any real use. Wind farms already cover many thousands of acres and we only get maybe 4% of all our power from them. I don't think they will be sufficient to supply the majority of our power, even if you covered every square inch of the earth that could possibly have any wind. I don't think anyone has considered the environmental impact of having every square inch of earth covered in wind turbines, not to mention the visual effect. Seeing those wind turbines may make people feel green, but I don't think they are. However, you can't really have an honest discussion about it, as many people are so sure it is a good thing they just dismiss any nay sayers instantly. Another thing that bugs me is that most of the US subsidy money is going to foreign companies. Seems like just another wealth distribution tactic to me.
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09 Aug 2017 10:44 PM
Of COURSE they do wind surveys before installing this stuff (they couldn't get it financed without it)!! There is now a lot of good science that allows them to predict with good accuracy what the annual output will be for a particular turbine at a particular site, far more accurately than back in the 1990s.

The capacity factors of wind turbines is getting better over time, with year-on-year incremental improvements in blade & turbine design, often tweaked for the wind characteristics of a specific site. Even though the typical lifecycle of a utility scale turbine is 20-25 years, one of the reasons many wind farms are being re-powered early at age 15 isn't because the original equipment is failing. It's more likely that the economics of replacing it with a newer cheaper version that produces 10-25% more annual power on the same site are more favorable than milking the last 5-10 years of service out of the lower-performance equipment. In some instances in the US the subsidies play into that economic decision as well.

New turbines in the windier parts of Texas are yielding capacity factors better than 40% now. Offshore turbines in the northeast are projected to get better than 50%. (The "capacity factor" number is the amount of power actually delivered compared to running 24/365 at the nameplate output rating.) Those capacity factors are comparable to the capacity factors of most combined cycle gas plants in the US.

Wind produced 6% of all grid power in the US in 2016, up from less than 1% a decade ago. Keep an eye on the growth curve, not just the absolute market share. There are many states where it's now well into double-digit percentages.

Most of the turbines & blades and 100% of the towers of wind farms in the US are built in the US. GE is a large US based multi-national turbine vendor with a large worldwide & US share, but Vestas also builds wind power equipment in the US. Most US wind farms are US owned too. I'm not sure how the thesis "...most of the US subsidy money is going to foreign companies..." is supportable with an arm-chair analysis, but if you can point to real data I'd be thrilled to see it.
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10 Aug 2017 01:30 PM
This is just the first page from my armchair surfing this morning.

"But policymakers at the federal and state level, unfortunately, have decided that the American people will have renewable energy, no matter how high the costs. As a result, taxpayers will be stuck paying the cost of subsidies to wealthy wind producers."

http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436228/wind-energy-subsidies-billions-and-billions-your-tax-dollars

http://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/frank-keating-i-signed-wind-industry-tax-breaks-and-i/article_3d48e13b-a64e-53e6-a53a-b12c932dea80.html

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/299405-iowa-wind-farm-generates-more-tax-credits-than

http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/17/report-feds-give-billions-to-foreign-green-energy-companies/

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/wind-power-equal-job-power/story?id=9759949
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10 Aug 2017 04:12 PM
There is one important factor you forget.
What for example was the monetary ROI (or payback) of putting a catalytic converter in each car? It actually made cars more expensive, and cost infrastructure investment, and the cars got less efficient.
And where would we be today without it?
If someone drives by a wind farm and see the turbines, feel privileged, there are parts of the world where you cannot see further than 500ft.

China and India are not most environmentally conscious, but their economy gets so negatively impacted, that it is cheaper to with renewables than continuing as they do. It is like Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. Imagine they would not have gotten their emissions under control. Plus it gives them a nice economic boost.
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10 Aug 2017 04:12 PM
There is one important factor you forget.
What for example was the monetary ROI (or payback) of putting a catalytic converter in each car? It actually made cars more expensive, and cost infrastructure investment, and the cars got less efficient.
And where would we be today without it?
If someone drives by a wind farm and see the turbines, feel privileged, there are parts of the world where you cannot see further than 500ft.

China and India are not most environmentally conscious, but their economy gets so negatively impacted, that it is cheaper to with renewables than continuing as they do. It is like Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. Imagine they would not have gotten their emissions under control. Plus it gives them a nice economic boost.
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10 Aug 2017 06:10 PM
Posted By Valveman on 10 Aug 2017 01:30 PM
This is just the first page from my armchair surfing this morning.

"But policymakers at the federal and state level, unfortunately, have decided that the American people will have renewable energy, no matter how high the costs. As a result, taxpayers will be stuck paying the cost of subsidies to wealthy wind producers."

http://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436228/wind-energy-subsidies-billions-and-billions-your-tax-dollars

http://www.tulsaworld.com/homepagelatest/frank-keating-i-signed-wind-industry-tax-breaks-and-i/article_3d48e13b-a64e-53e6-a53a-b12c932dea80.html

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/299405-iowa-wind-farm-generates-more-tax-credits-than

http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/17/report-feds-give-billions-to-foreign-green-energy-companies/

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/wind-power-equal-job-power/story?id=9759949


Of the several companies listed in the Newsweek bit only the multinational Ibderola is a "foreign" company, and still most of the wind hardware they install in the USA is built in the USA, and all of the labor is US.

The National Review article does not mention any foreign companies.

The Tulsa World doesn't mention ANY companies, foreign or domestic.

The Hill only mentions MidAmerican Energy, a US company.

The Daily Caller article states:

“The 50 parent companies receiving the most federal grants and allocated tax credits include 10 foreign based firms"

Wow, 10 out of 50 "parent" companies of the companies taking the grants & credit subsidies aren't US based, clearly a majority of that subsidy money is going to foreigners!?!

By that reckoning I should stop paying my electricity bill, since the parent company of my electric utility (National Grid) is based in the UK. (Didn't we fight a revolution to keep their grimy paws out of our pockets! :-) )

The 2010 ABC news bit (ancient, in US wind power history terms) points out that the Spanish turbine vendor Gamesa set up blade manufacturing in Pennsylvania, not exactly an importer. They also mention a Chinese wind farm developer A-power building a large wind farm in Texas, but that was probably their first & last project in the US, and more than 75% of all wind power in the US has been installed AFTER that article went to press.

As a general rule the nature of infrastructure projects is that most of the money is spent fairly locally, and that's true of wind power as well, even if some of the manufactured hardware is built in another country. Turbine blades are a PITA to package & ship, and are usually built locally. The transmissions & generators in US wind farms come from many sources, but GE has the largest market share (over 40% ), and many of the "foreign" vendors of that hardware have been building them in the US, including Spanish based Vestas (currently holding over 20% share of the US wind power market.) Together they account for 2/3 of the total US market. The only other vendor that makes it (barely) into a double-digit percentage of the US market is Siemens, which also builds at least some of the hardware here (in Kansas).

So far the most you've presented is a bunch of whining about the efficacy (or lack thereof) of subsidies in attaining all of their policy goals, which is a topic worthy of discussion (perhaps on some other forum), but is not supporting the thesis that the subsidy money has gone mostly to foreign interests. In fact the above collection of articles indicates quite the opposite, that the majority of the subsidy money stayed in the US.
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