When I was working at the last big law firm I'll ever work at, we represented Vestas. It's a good company, but there are scams galore going on with the power purchase agreements and development deals that are part of the wind industry. Another lawyer at the firm ended up making many millions of dollars by going in house at one of the companies that buy and deploy the wind turbines, even though these things rarely produced the kind of output claimed. What they do is they sell off various parts of the wind projects, often for tax credits, and never really have to live up to the claimed energy production numbers.
It's legal, but like many things that are legal it stinks. The people who make the money are taking it from ratepayers and taxpayers without providing much in exchange.
No doubt. My college room mate was the economic analyst for wind power projects for Rabobank for many years, and there really was no analysis done on the performance of the project. It was completely driven by the legal environment and rate incentives.
My best friend in High School just retired after "selling" several wind turbines to the public through a "buy shares in green energy" scheme. He did good, not sure the "investors" will see much of a return, especially since their investment is essentially technically obsolete the day it goes on line.
All that said, by building these things, the technology gets proven, and this allows the engineers to design much better machines and the cost of wind generation is still dropping about 2% per year. In other words, the cost of wind should be about half of what it is today in 30 years.
