Recent newspaper articles report that Dominion Energy plans to build, off the Virginia coast, a few global warming scarecrows, commonly known as windmills.  In fact, the Wednesday, Aug. 8 edition of The Coastland Times states: “Dominion said it will fund the $300 million project with no added costs to taxpayers.”

Is a reader to believe that Dominion has suddenly become a lavish philanthropic entity willing to take, from profits, nearly a third of a billion dollars on what clearly has proven, in Europe, to be an extremely expensive boondoggle?  And surely if taxpayers don’t pay, ratepayers will be forced to!

Someone at Dominion probably reads foreign newspapers. Yet it appears that no one knows that Denmark, the world’s leader in windmill folly, recently abandoned plans to build five offshore wind power stations because resulting electricity would be too expensive.  Since 2012, the cost of electricity in Denmark has increased dramatically with Danes now paying the highest price in Europe. Furthermore, we learn that while Danes have been paying billions of dollars in taxes and fees to support wind power, electricity prices have skyrocketed to a level that “green” taxes now make up 66 percent of each Danish customer’s monthly electricity bill.

Obsession with windmills, both on land and offshore, is one of the greatest technological blunders of our time.  Lacking prohibitively expensive and extensive storage facilities, wind cannot become a commercially viable source of electricity and will always require massive subsidies.  Wind simply cannot provide abundant, affordable, reliable, industrial-strength power that America needs and, as if building windmills on land isn’t foolish enough, erecting windmills miles out into the ocean is an outrageously costly way to generate electricity, a senseless waste of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars.

I am continually puzzled as to why any citizen (except a wind developer or other environmental predator) would beg to pay more federal and state taxes for the privilege of paying much higher electricity bills.

Building windmills out in the ocean (or on land), instead of building more hydrocarbon and nuclear power plants, represents little more than ideologically-driven, environmental, political correctness. Instead, we should stop spending money we don’t have … to solve problems that don’t exist … at the behest of people we don’t elect, all of this further burdening our grandchildren with enormous debt. We need to stop this generational theft

S. Medeiros, Jr., Kitty Hawk