With recent help from the federal government, Louisiana can ensure wind power advocates don’t take advantage of the state.

A recent article in leftist media lamented how Republican Pres. Donald Trump short-circuited efforts to spread windmills from sea to shining sea. Trump appears to have a visceral dislike of wind power and early in his second term basically brought offshore wind power to a halt by declaring no permits would go to new projects and by discouraging, even in a sense through bribing, existing projects from moving forward.

But states control wind power regulation on land except for that owned by the federal government, and that has steadily marched on. However, Trump did address an unfair advantage that wind power had, federal tax credits, by eliminating with the help of Congress those for projects not started by the middle of this year or if not completed by the end of next year. There was no defensible intellectual reason to give preference to this source of intermittent energy production when none existed specifically for other fossil fuel-based reliable power-generating activities.

Louisiana also has done it part to curtail unfair advantages that wind power had. In the past two years, it has passed laws requiring wind producers to take responsibility for disposing of potentially dangerous scrap from onshore wind turbines and codified permit rules supposed to be issued through the Department of Conservation and Energy, although it appears to have missed a deadline of the end of August to do so.

There’s no hurry, since there are no windmills yet in operation. Two onshore sets supposedly are in the pipeline, apparently needing to come to completion by the end of 2027 to retain tax credits; whether they will or become abandoned as a result of absence of credit will manifest within 15 months.

However, while increasingly county governments nationwide set standards, such as setbacks from property or roads, only six parishes as of last year had done so (some counties ban turbines outright). Perhaps the most comprehensive of the bunch is LaSalle which regulates in 14 different ways, from setback to noise to color. St. Landry has its own regulations and is one of the two permitted sites. Yet while some states have no regulation at all of wind turbines, Louisiana only has the decommissioning law, still incomplete.

The state would benefit by adopting statewide standards to regulate wind power generation, the more detailed the better. It has for solar but it lets parishes institute even stricter standards; a similar arrangement would work well. And despite all the caterwauling from climate alarmists about Trump’s actions, wind power in output grew five times faster than natural gas year-over-year, even as a gas prices went down, so more regulation doesn’t seem to be hampering the sector.

Above all, the state must resist any favoritism such as subsidization for wind power. If it makes economic sense in the market should be the only standard by which building turbines occurs.