BP's Robert Dudley on the Gulf Oil Spill's Legal Aftermath

Below are excerpts from this article that pertain to BP's investment in Wind.

Your predecessor once removed, Lord Browne, used to boast that BP stood for “beyond petroleum,” an implied promise to move away from fossil fuels. That campaign has disappeared, and you’ve reduced BP’s activities in alternative energy. Why?
Well, that’s right. In 1997, Lord Browne made the speech at Stanford that said, “Not really sure about global climate change, but we can’t be sure, so therefore we need to invest and make sure that technology’s developed as a result of it.” That was very unpopular with the rest of the industry. I used to run the alternative energy side of BP, back about 10 or 12 years ago. We probably invested about $8 billion, not in research, but real projects. The reality is that over time the economics of those have proven very, very difficult. Often, many of these businesses are subsidized by governments. Governments remove the subsidies, so the economics suddenly change. Just this last year, after 40 years as a company with a solar business, we decided you can’t make money in the solar industry, so we moved out of that. We have focused our efforts into biofuels, ethanol fuels—mainly sugar cane in Brazil.

Not in this country?
Well, we went down the path here of what would have been a very high-risk, highly technical, $800 million project in Florida. We didn’t actually get very much encouragement from the U.S., and we’ve got to be really careful how and where we invest our capital now, so we decided not to do that investment last year. In wind, we have 1,000 wind turbines and about 16 big wind projects here in the U.S. We’ll probably call a halt to developing more of those, but the wind will be spinning, and it’ll create the electrons, so that’ll be a part of our business as well. 

Continue...[ Bloomberg Business Week]