I fail to see how wind power can be considered green, when it kills untold numbers of birds & creates noise pollution, further affecting the surrounding habitat. It's not very efficient, & only works when the wind blows. Turbines spoil the landscape.
I think the usual argument is that the pushed technologies may sort of suck now, but if you throw enough public R&D money at them, they can be improved to the point of becoming viable (same story goes for "inefficient" photovoltaics that "take more energy to manufacture than you will ever get out of them" - which used to be true, but is wrong today).
Of course, given large upfront expenses, it's a risky commercial proposition, so the good old capitalistic way of raising funds may be insufficient or may evoke conflicts of interest. Think about the Internet: had it not been a subsidized research project, would it have evolved into the global free-for-all network? Or would it rather stay a sucky compartmentalized set of services offered by individual companies, like some of them would still love to have it today?
So I'm not against taxes/public funding for big infrastructure projects in general, but it has to be scrutinized to a great extent and then carefully controlled to avoid the undesirable scammy redistribution you mentioned. Certainly, given the amount of politics and potential for abuse in such grand projects, claiming to consumers that "green is good" and "non-green is evil", you should support "us good guys" is a patronizing, brainwashing simplification, which is the main reason why I dislike how utility companies try to market their product.
