Here in California, state law requires power companies to produce something like 15% of their power from renewables by a future date.   Yet, in Europe where  they have been at this madness for longer, and whose laws the California government apparently seeks to emulate, it has been found through sad experience that such efforts to legislate power production are futile and waste huge sums of money.

From the Daily Mail article:

Europe's focus on wind power is crippling British energy users with additional costs as it is not a cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a report has found.

The EU has directed governments to generate 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020, leading many to focus on wind.

But wind power is unreliable and requires back-up gas power stations to maintain a consistent electricity supply, the Civitas think-tank study found.

It means energy users pay twice – once for the ‘window-dressing’ of renewables and again for fossil fuels the energy sector continues to rely on.

Here in California, there has perhaps understandably been more of an emphasis on solar power, but it too suffers from some of the same problems as wind power, namely high expense and unreliability.  Nevertheless, distorted by political rather than market forces, it is full steam ahead here with large solar power installations now beginning to dot the landscape.  I certainly hope that in the end we get a better return on our money, and less of a boondoggle, than the Euros have experienced.

Directing the results desired by legislation rarely ever ends well, but it seems that our politicians never learn the lesson.