To fly a kite let me suggest that there are secondary problems with wind power such as the cost, the destabilisation of the grid and the environmental impact.
The primary problem is the impossibility of a transition from conventional power to grids dominated by wind and solar power due to the phenomenon of wind droughts.
Consider the ABC of intermittent energy generation.
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
Therefore, the green transition is impossible with current storage technology.
In Australia, the transition to unreliable wind and solar power has just hit the wall, while Britain and Germany have passed the tipping point and entered a “red zone,” keeping the lights on precariously with imports and deindustrialization to reduce demand.
The meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the irresponsible authorities never checked the wind supply! They even missed the Dunkelflautes that must have been known to mariners and millers for centuries!
There is an urgent need to find out why the meteorologists failed to warn us about wind droughts and why energy planners didn’t check. Imagine embarking on a major irrigation project without forensic investigation of the water supply including historical rainfall figures.
Connecting subsidised and mandated unreliable energy to the grid is probably the biggest public policy blunder ever in peacetime.
Trillions of dollars have been spent worldwide to get electricity that is more expensive and less reliable with massive collateral damage to the planet.
THE WIND DROUGHT TRAP
Can the US escape from the wind drought trap?
The US may be only one Democrat administration away from following the example of Germany and Britain. They are in the jaws of the wind drought trap and it is up to the Trump administration to get them out.
The power crisis in Texas in February 2021 was a taste of things to come when a bitter cold spell and low winds overnight caused a partial blackout of the state. The inadequately winterised gas supply underperformed and a complete blackout was only narrowly averted, due to some coal and nuclear capacity. Hundreds died and a complete blackout could have killed many thousands.
That is the way things are going in all the grids in the US and in every other system where net zero policies are in place.
The trap is set slowly over many years as subsidies and mandates for unreliable energy displace conventional power without being able to replace it because there is no way to firm unreliable energy by installing more unreliable energy.
There is a “frog in the saucepan” effect because conventional power retires in small steps and that does not cause problems in the early years while there is spare capacity. That was the case in SE Australia before Hazelwood and Liddell closed. The trap only causes public alarm when it is too late, as we see in Britain and Germany.
The US is moving rapidly in the same direction and grid managers are becoming increasingly agitated. Apparently they have not effectively shared their concerns with the general public and there is no electoral pressure on the lawmakers to change course. The incoming administration will have to provide a crash course in wind literacy to change the public perception of wind power and explain the value of coal power, especially in extremely cold conditions.
The trap closes when the conventional power capacity (traditionally dominated by coal) declines to a critical point, a “tipping point” where there is not enough to meet the base load overnight. Then the grid is in a “red zone” where windless nights are potentially lethal because there is no wind or solar generation, regardless of the amount of installed capacity.
The incompetence or negligence of the Government meteorologists around the world allowed this situation to develop because they didn’t issue wind drought warnings even though they know that high pressure systems cause low winds.
The plot thickens when we discover that the World Meteorological Organization must have known about wind droughts because the first Assessment report of the IPCC recommended a survey of the wind resources of the world to assess the prospects for large-scale wind power. That would have been led by the WMO, working with the official meteorologists around the world.
Moreover the WMO was a first mover in the climate alarm campaign in the UN and all the met offices have been hyperactive in supporting the scare by tampering with temperature records and attributing extreme weather events to climate change.
The climate alarmists in the UN set out to wreck the capitalist economies of the west (to save the planet) and they have practically achieved that objective in Britain and Germany where the lights are kept on precariously with imported power while they deindustrialize to reduce demand.
Australia is on the cusp and it remains to be seen how the old coal burners can keep running for a decade or three until nuclear power may be available at scale.
Turning to the United States, it is imperative to save coal and gas generators from the impending EPA regulations that were designed to close them down. COAL IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT DURING EXTREMELY COLD WEATHER BECAUSE GAS CAN FAIL IF IT IS NOT ADEQUATEY WINTERIZED.
Community support for the net zero program must be undermined by explaining the wind drought problem, which makes the energy transition impossible, and the cost of the program, which makes the effort prohibitively expensive.
At the same time the meteorologists should be put on the rack and forced to confess that they have been playing a devious game on instructions from the WMO and the United Nations.
That will justify the termination of financial support to the offending agencies.
With leadership from the Federal administration and support from red states, a sustained and effective communication campaign could give climate and energy realism a moral ascendancy over the ideological, financial and political interests that support the climate industrial complex.
Rafe: TY for your extensive comment. Any competent Grid person knows that the appropriate solution for unreliables, is to have a 100% auxiliary backup (preferably gas) for every MW installed. None of this is done as it would make it obvious to even non-technical consumers that this is at least a doubling of the cost of unreliables, and their lobbyists have gone to great lengths to push "the wind is free" narrative.
Ignoring this reality will catch up to whoever does it, sooner or later — and the penalty will be severe. Fortunately Trump gets this, and his appointee to DOE also seems to, so we will hopefully be going into a correction phase to counter the prior years of virtue signaling by Democrats and other technically challanged parties.
I just learned of another transmission cost from Doomberg: The peak power of a solar or wind plantation is intended to be the same as a thermal power plant, so its transmission line must support the same peak power. But the capacity factor of any transmission line is the same as that of its generators — actually somewhat less to provide margin. That means that the transmission cost for the same megawatt hour must be the same as the inverse of capacity factor, to pay off the mortgage. So transmission costs for solar and wind are 3-4 times greater even without factoring in the distance from behind the back of nowhere to where the power is actually needed.
If wind power were so great, we'd still be using sailing ships to transport everything across our oceans. We need to move into the future with dispatchable power sources like SMR's. Thank you for exposing the reality of the unreliables, John Droz Jr.
Yes, this was an economics column (and another of John's excellent ones), but to answer Reed's question, EROI for wind and solar is about 4:1 within the current electricity system, but economic viability needs 7:1, as explained by Daniel Weißbach et al. Advocates' answer to the storage problem is to build more generators, but that drives down EROI, not least because of power dumping. With average generating capacity at three times average demand, which isn't yet enough to allow building sufficient storage given materials and financial constraints, EROI is about 0.56. And an infinite number of solar panels won't charge one iPhone at midnight.
Every time I see an article about solar panels in orbit, I ask the author what EROI would be. I never get a reply.
Wind energy is killing millions of birds...and only works when it is windy. It is totally unreliable. However, our government and corporations are always looking for some scam to rake in billions without giving a thought to the end results...harming the environment or wiping out other species. They don't even care about their own species!!! All they care about is the money!
Barbara: Yes. I factored in the unreliable part (auxiliary power sources needed). I did not specifically address birds being killed, as it is it very difficult to put an economic value on birds. On the other hand, it has been done for bats, which I mentioned.
Your item No. 3 is far more of a consideration than most Americans understand. Every single dollar of debt has a negative value that is ridiculous if we analyze it properly. It is precisely the opposite of compound interest but the same formula is at work, only in reverse.
If we look at this logically, the main question must be, “ When will this debt be eliminated?” And, based on reality, the answer is, “Never!” So, the calculation of the long term damage of each debt dollar gets confused since the key calculation involves time.
But, to simplify and be super conservative, let’s assume the debt will be with us for 60 years and the FED can borrow money at 4.8% like the 30-year treasury is today. This says the long term negative present worth of each dollar is $16.67! In other words, the unfunded liability of our national debt is $607 Trillion if we never take on another dollar of debt.
The key point I am making is every dollar of debt our Congress agrees to take on needs to be multiplied by 16.67 to give us an accurate real cost to us tax payers.
My friends, this is a realty that somehow is missed daily by about 300 million Americans. Somehow we allow our politicians to sell us the idea that kicking the debt can down the road is a workable solution. This is a part of our education system that is missing and requires some critical analysis.
When they vote to allocate $20 Billion to green energy, is it worth $333.4 Billion in reality? That is the real question. How is that $333.4 Billion going to be paid back to us “investors”? They say green energy is an investment in our future. I say, “Bullshit.”
John, I hope your "Critical Thinking" insights are studied by some appropriate group of Team-Trump problem solvers because they apply to all the mega corruption we seek to root out.
The 1619 Project and Green New Deal are so audaciously false that only in a population with such low critical thinking skills could this Woke poison take root in the first place.
Cultural Marxists have spent decades striving to demoralize us and destabilize our nation via their "long march" through our institutions. They are a formidable force we must defeat.
Free speech plus a fearless cohort of critical thinkers who articulate what is needed in clear terms are (in essence) our only chance for Faith, Freedom, and Family to prevail.
To me, this means we must be ready, willing, and able to march to the sound of the LIES of the Left and destroy them again and again...which you are doing again and again. Semper Fi.
Jud: Yes, we are hoping that the new Trump team (Chris Wright, Elon, Vivak, etc.) will be more focused on important matters like the true cost of wind and solar. As explained above, this fiasco now is costing us in the neighborhood of a Trillion dollars! Enough already!
Great article, Charles. Many people are against wind power for all the "sense of place" reasons, killing eagles, polluting the ground, etc. My major problem with wind is the cost, and you've reinforced my opinion with this article. Without subsidies, wind power would be nonexistent. The same with solar. Both have use in remote locations where no other option exists, however neither can compete without government assistance. It's time we let the market decide instead of politicians!
Environists (no mental in the middle) insist an all-electric American energy economy would have average appetite for 1,700 GWe. Analysis of renewables' generation compared to demand shows that about 1,000 watt hours of storage per watt of average demand would be needed to provide firm power (http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html). At today's EIA purchase prices for batteries, excluding transportation, installation, operations, maintenance, decommissioning, recycling, and landfilling, the cost would be at least four times total USA GDP — every year, forever. Moore's Law for batteries was over before 1900, so don't expect price reductions of more than a factor of two. Pumped storage or towing rocks up mountainsides or flywheels or ultracapacitors won't work. More details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
Jack: Not sure who Charles is (this is John writing). Yes, there is no legitimate reason that wind and solar should be categorized as "politically favored." Some might think that they are critically important in "saving the planet" but that is a lie, just like their low cost claim is. See this for more details about that charade <https://wiseenergy.org/Energy/Wind_Other/Wind_&_AGW_Full.pdf>.
John, Charles is the author of the article I was replying to. I read your article - that's a great piece! I'd like to share it with my readers if you don't mind. There are a lot of people who should see it. Jack
My biggest concern with wind is its natural mismatch with electrical demand. On the hottest days of the year, by definition, the wind does not blow (if the wind were blowing, the temperatures would be moderated by the natural air movement—hottest days tend to have calm air). In these conditions the utility has to shop for the most expensive back-up sources with little, or no help from wind.
A few years ago, I looked at the wind performance of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), an enormous provider in the Pacific Northwest. Of their 11,000 MW system, they had installed 3,000 MW of wind. On the peak day (I think it was 2011) guess how much wind was actually operating during peak demand? None!
Kimball: Agreed. As a former CEO of a utility company, you were well-positioned to see first-hand the adverse consequences of adding an uncontrolled source to the Grid that has to be balanced every second.
You left out 5 important issues. COST OF MAINTENCE, DEICING, OIL 450 GALLONS EACH THAT LEAK INTO THE SOIL, STORAGE OF DEFUNCT WINDMILLS THAT DO NOT DECOMPOSE, EFFECT ON SOIL THAT GETS CONTIMATED FROM THE MINE SHAFTS, AND DEAD EAGLES OR OTHER BIRDS OF PREY, that are a natural enviromental pest control.
Well done. Time to do one on solar panels, loss of farm land, jobs, product, near schools, on Military Bases. Concrete heat, storm damage, maintence, and how do they effect our bodies. 5 G towers ping my hearing aids.
AR: Yes those are costs, but this article was about costs to taxpayers and ratepayers. Things like de-icing and maintainence are not billed to either taxpayers or ratepayers.
"Things like de-icing and maintainance are not billed to either taxpayers or ratepayers." Like corporate income taxes, they're indeed billed to taxpayers and ratepayers and investors and employees' benefits and R&D reductions and …, they're just not itemized.
To fly a kite let me suggest that there are secondary problems with wind power such as the cost, the destabilisation of the grid and the environmental impact.
The primary problem is the impossibility of a transition from conventional power to grids dominated by wind and solar power due to the phenomenon of wind droughts.
Consider the ABC of intermittent energy generation.
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
Therefore, the green transition is impossible with current storage technology.
In Australia, the transition to unreliable wind and solar power has just hit the wall, while Britain and Germany have passed the tipping point and entered a “red zone,” keeping the lights on precariously with imports and deindustrialization to reduce demand.
The meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the irresponsible authorities never checked the wind supply! They even missed the Dunkelflautes that must have been known to mariners and millers for centuries!
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
There is an urgent need to find out why the meteorologists failed to warn us about wind droughts and why energy planners didn’t check. Imagine embarking on a major irrigation project without forensic investigation of the water supply including historical rainfall figures.
Connecting subsidised and mandated unreliable energy to the grid is probably the biggest public policy blunder ever in peacetime.
Trillions of dollars have been spent worldwide to get electricity that is more expensive and less reliable with massive collateral damage to the planet.
THE WIND DROUGHT TRAP
Can the US escape from the wind drought trap?
The US may be only one Democrat administration away from following the example of Germany and Britain. They are in the jaws of the wind drought trap and it is up to the Trump administration to get them out.
The power crisis in Texas in February 2021 was a taste of things to come when a bitter cold spell and low winds overnight caused a partial blackout of the state. The inadequately winterised gas supply underperformed and a complete blackout was only narrowly averted, due to some coal and nuclear capacity. Hundreds died and a complete blackout could have killed many thousands.
That is the way things are going in all the grids in the US and in every other system where net zero policies are in place.
The trap is set slowly over many years as subsidies and mandates for unreliable energy displace conventional power without being able to replace it because there is no way to firm unreliable energy by installing more unreliable energy.
There is a “frog in the saucepan” effect because conventional power retires in small steps and that does not cause problems in the early years while there is spare capacity. That was the case in SE Australia before Hazelwood and Liddell closed. The trap only causes public alarm when it is too late, as we see in Britain and Germany.
The US is moving rapidly in the same direction and grid managers are becoming increasingly agitated. Apparently they have not effectively shared their concerns with the general public and there is no electoral pressure on the lawmakers to change course. The incoming administration will have to provide a crash course in wind literacy to change the public perception of wind power and explain the value of coal power, especially in extremely cold conditions.
The trap closes when the conventional power capacity (traditionally dominated by coal) declines to a critical point, a “tipping point” where there is not enough to meet the base load overnight. Then the grid is in a “red zone” where windless nights are potentially lethal because there is no wind or solar generation, regardless of the amount of installed capacity.
The incompetence or negligence of the Government meteorologists around the world allowed this situation to develop because they didn’t issue wind drought warnings even though they know that high pressure systems cause low winds.
The plot thickens when we discover that the World Meteorological Organization must have known about wind droughts because the first Assessment report of the IPCC recommended a survey of the wind resources of the world to assess the prospects for large-scale wind power. That would have been led by the WMO, working with the official meteorologists around the world.
Moreover the WMO was a first mover in the climate alarm campaign in the UN and all the met offices have been hyperactive in supporting the scare by tampering with temperature records and attributing extreme weather events to climate change.
The climate alarmists in the UN set out to wreck the capitalist economies of the west (to save the planet) and they have practically achieved that objective in Britain and Germany where the lights are kept on precariously with imported power while they deindustrialize to reduce demand.
Australia is on the cusp and it remains to be seen how the old coal burners can keep running for a decade or three until nuclear power may be available at scale.
Turning to the United States, it is imperative to save coal and gas generators from the impending EPA regulations that were designed to close them down. COAL IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT DURING EXTREMELY COLD WEATHER BECAUSE GAS CAN FAIL IF IT IS NOT ADEQUATEY WINTERIZED.
Community support for the net zero program must be undermined by explaining the wind drought problem, which makes the energy transition impossible, and the cost of the program, which makes the effort prohibitively expensive.
At the same time the meteorologists should be put on the rack and forced to confess that they have been playing a devious game on instructions from the WMO and the United Nations.
That will justify the termination of financial support to the offending agencies.
With leadership from the Federal administration and support from red states, a sustained and effective communication campaign could give climate and energy realism a moral ascendancy over the ideological, financial and political interests that support the climate industrial complex.
Rafe: TY for your extensive comment. Any competent Grid person knows that the appropriate solution for unreliables, is to have a 100% auxiliary backup (preferably gas) for every MW installed. None of this is done as it would make it obvious to even non-technical consumers that this is at least a doubling of the cost of unreliables, and their lobbyists have gone to great lengths to push "the wind is free" narrative.
Ignoring this reality will catch up to whoever does it, sooner or later — and the penalty will be severe. Fortunately Trump gets this, and his appointee to DOE also seems to, so we will hopefully be going into a correction phase to counter the prior years of virtue signaling by Democrats and other technically challanged parties.
I just learned of another transmission cost from Doomberg: The peak power of a solar or wind plantation is intended to be the same as a thermal power plant, so its transmission line must support the same peak power. But the capacity factor of any transmission line is the same as that of its generators — actually somewhat less to provide margin. That means that the transmission cost for the same megawatt hour must be the same as the inverse of capacity factor, to pay off the mortgage. So transmission costs for solar and wind are 3-4 times greater even without factoring in the distance from behind the back of nowhere to where the power is actually needed.
If wind power were so great, we'd still be using sailing ships to transport everything across our oceans. We need to move into the future with dispatchable power sources like SMR's. Thank you for exposing the reality of the unreliables, John Droz Jr.
SM: TY.
So, in your opinion, after having done this analysis, is the EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) for wind energy greater or less than 1:1 ?
John: This is an economic analysis, not an energy one.
Yes, this was an economics column (and another of John's excellent ones), but to answer Reed's question, EROI for wind and solar is about 4:1 within the current electricity system, but economic viability needs 7:1, as explained by Daniel Weißbach et al. Advocates' answer to the storage problem is to build more generators, but that drives down EROI, not least because of power dumping. With average generating capacity at three times average demand, which isn't yet enough to allow building sufficient storage given materials and financial constraints, EROI is about 0.56. And an infinite number of solar panels won't charge one iPhone at midnight.
Every time I see an article about solar panels in orbit, I ask the author what EROI would be. I never get a reply.
Wind energy is killing millions of birds...and only works when it is windy. It is totally unreliable. However, our government and corporations are always looking for some scam to rake in billions without giving a thought to the end results...harming the environment or wiping out other species. They don't even care about their own species!!! All they care about is the money!
In "Apocalypse Never," Mike Shellenberger asked "Must we destroy the environment to save the planet?"
Barbara: Yes. I factored in the unreliable part (auxiliary power sources needed). I did not specifically address birds being killed, as it is it very difficult to put an economic value on birds. On the other hand, it has been done for bats, which I mentioned.
Your item No. 3 is far more of a consideration than most Americans understand. Every single dollar of debt has a negative value that is ridiculous if we analyze it properly. It is precisely the opposite of compound interest but the same formula is at work, only in reverse.
If we look at this logically, the main question must be, “ When will this debt be eliminated?” And, based on reality, the answer is, “Never!” So, the calculation of the long term damage of each debt dollar gets confused since the key calculation involves time.
But, to simplify and be super conservative, let’s assume the debt will be with us for 60 years and the FED can borrow money at 4.8% like the 30-year treasury is today. This says the long term negative present worth of each dollar is $16.67! In other words, the unfunded liability of our national debt is $607 Trillion if we never take on another dollar of debt.
The key point I am making is every dollar of debt our Congress agrees to take on needs to be multiplied by 16.67 to give us an accurate real cost to us tax payers.
My friends, this is a realty that somehow is missed daily by about 300 million Americans. Somehow we allow our politicians to sell us the idea that kicking the debt can down the road is a workable solution. This is a part of our education system that is missing and requires some critical analysis.
When they vote to allocate $20 Billion to green energy, is it worth $333.4 Billion in reality? That is the real question. How is that $333.4 Billion going to be paid back to us “investors”? They say green energy is an investment in our future. I say, “Bullshit.”
John, I hope your "Critical Thinking" insights are studied by some appropriate group of Team-Trump problem solvers because they apply to all the mega corruption we seek to root out.
The 1619 Project and Green New Deal are so audaciously false that only in a population with such low critical thinking skills could this Woke poison take root in the first place.
Cultural Marxists have spent decades striving to demoralize us and destabilize our nation via their "long march" through our institutions. They are a formidable force we must defeat.
Free speech plus a fearless cohort of critical thinkers who articulate what is needed in clear terms are (in essence) our only chance for Faith, Freedom, and Family to prevail.
To me, this means we must be ready, willing, and able to march to the sound of the LIES of the Left and destroy them again and again...which you are doing again and again. Semper Fi.
Jud: Yes, we are hoping that the new Trump team (Chris Wright, Elon, Vivak, etc.) will be more focused on important matters like the true cost of wind and solar. As explained above, this fiasco now is costing us in the neighborhood of a Trillion dollars! Enough already!
Great article, Charles. Many people are against wind power for all the "sense of place" reasons, killing eagles, polluting the ground, etc. My major problem with wind is the cost, and you've reinforced my opinion with this article. Without subsidies, wind power would be nonexistent. The same with solar. Both have use in remote locations where no other option exists, however neither can compete without government assistance. It's time we let the market decide instead of politicians!
Environists (no mental in the middle) insist an all-electric American energy economy would have average appetite for 1,700 GWe. Analysis of renewables' generation compared to demand shows that about 1,000 watt hours of storage per watt of average demand would be needed to provide firm power (http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html). At today's EIA purchase prices for batteries, excluding transportation, installation, operations, maintenance, decommissioning, recycling, and landfilling, the cost would be at least four times total USA GDP — every year, forever. Moore's Law for batteries was over before 1900, so don't expect price reductions of more than a factor of two. Pumped storage or towing rocks up mountainsides or flywheels or ultracapacitors won't work. More details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
Jack: Not sure who Charles is (this is John writing). Yes, there is no legitimate reason that wind and solar should be categorized as "politically favored." Some might think that they are critically important in "saving the planet" but that is a lie, just like their low cost claim is. See this for more details about that charade <https://wiseenergy.org/Energy/Wind_Other/Wind_&_AGW_Full.pdf>.
John, Charles is the author of the article I was replying to. I read your article - that's a great piece! I'd like to share it with my readers if you don't mind. There are a lot of people who should see it. Jack
Jack: All of my writings are in the public domain, so you are welcome to pass them on — with proper attribution.
Thank you
My biggest concern with wind is its natural mismatch with electrical demand. On the hottest days of the year, by definition, the wind does not blow (if the wind were blowing, the temperatures would be moderated by the natural air movement—hottest days tend to have calm air). In these conditions the utility has to shop for the most expensive back-up sources with little, or no help from wind.
A few years ago, I looked at the wind performance of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), an enormous provider in the Pacific Northwest. Of their 11,000 MW system, they had installed 3,000 MW of wind. On the peak day (I think it was 2011) guess how much wind was actually operating during peak demand? None!
Kimball: Agreed. As a former CEO of a utility company, you were well-positioned to see first-hand the adverse consequences of adding an uncontrolled source to the Grid that has to be balanced every second.
You left out 5 important issues. COST OF MAINTENCE, DEICING, OIL 450 GALLONS EACH THAT LEAK INTO THE SOIL, STORAGE OF DEFUNCT WINDMILLS THAT DO NOT DECOMPOSE, EFFECT ON SOIL THAT GETS CONTIMATED FROM THE MINE SHAFTS, AND DEAD EAGLES OR OTHER BIRDS OF PREY, that are a natural enviromental pest control.
Well done. Time to do one on solar panels, loss of farm land, jobs, product, near schools, on Military Bases. Concrete heat, storm damage, maintence, and how do they effect our bodies. 5 G towers ping my hearing aids.
AR: Yes those are costs, but this article was about costs to taxpayers and ratepayers. Things like de-icing and maintainence are not billed to either taxpayers or ratepayers.
"Things like de-icing and maintainance are not billed to either taxpayers or ratepayers." Like corporate income taxes, they're indeed billed to taxpayers and ratepayers and investors and employees' benefits and R&D reductions and …, they're just not itemized.