An American Personal Perspective - Wind Power for the World: The Rise of Modern Wind Energy - page 568

time, a Vestas V-44 600. This wind turbine was the only machine
sold by Vestas that year in America. With the development of this
first electric-utility-scale commercial wind project in Michigan, a
state with ten million population, the community municipal electric
utility director received a letter from the Michigan State University
Electrical Engineering Department recommending against the
project. The letter told the utility director, that “only Democrats
would consider such a wind project.” Fortunately, the nearly 100%
Republican utility board of directors and City Commission ignored
the professors political opinions.

25.9 It Is (also) about Money

Over 50 residential and commercial customers of the 8 000
customer municipal utility volunteered to pay an additional
USD 7.50 per month on average to add this new wind power to
the generation mix, at no additional cost to any other customers.
Steve Smiley adapted these green pricing policies, which had
been advocated by David Moskewitz and Ed Holt from the State
of Maine, to fit the practical situation at TCL&P. While “green
pricing” is not the best policy model to advance renewable energy,
it was one of the few practical policy tools on the table at the time
that would be adopted by electric utilities. Sophisticated TCL&P
customers told Smiley “why should we pay more for good things,
it's the bad things that should be penalised.” The best clean
energy policies are now understood to be feed-in tarifs and black
pricing.
While the TCL&P wind power green pricing program was not
expanded in Michigan, it was adopted for solar electric programs
and widely copied in North America, led by work in Colorado
with Randy Udall and Rudd Mayer, and the City of Austin Texas.
Austin copied the TCL&P model and installed roughly 50 MW
of wind power, while Colorado and other western states installed
over 1 000 MW of wind power with this policy model—roughly
USD .5 billion of installations.
The American wind industry grew in the mid-1990s based on
the tax policies of accelerated depreciation schedules established
in 1986 (5 year/double declining balance, MACRS) and the 10
year production tax credit of USD 0.015/kWh established as part