Green Madness
As the Solyndra scandal continues to unfold I’m beginning to think it may finally begin to bring some sanity to this quasi-religious push for green energy. If you haven’t been following it in the news, Solyndra is the solar panel maker that got a $500+ million government loan guarantee, used the money to build a huge new factory, and promptly filed for bankruptcy. Turns out it was costing them $6 a pop to build panels that were on the market for less than $2. It was obvious before they got the guarantee that their business plan wasn’t viable. At least it was obvious to any analyst who bothered to look.
Colossal waste has become a familiar theme in the green energy business. We pour billions into obscenely expensive technologies that don’t work, are known to be unreliable, and have undesirable economic and ecological side effects. Often justified as jobs creators, what few jobs materialize are either overseas or come with eye popping costs. Solyndra is just one spectacular example.
Another one that should be getting more attention is the Texas wind boondoggle. Texas has more wind generating capacity than any other state, a lot more. Our politicians have been falling all over themselves to promote it. Boone Pickens invested a fortune in it. Boone learned his lesson but taxpayers (and rate payers) continue to invest. Drive down I 45 toward Houston and you will see a steady stream of trucks hauling turbine blades north, all of them imported by ship from China, the same China where the $2 solar panels are made. But a funny thing happened. We had a brutally hot summer in Texas. Air conditioning demand peaked at levels dangerously near grid capacity. Where was the wind-generated electricity? It wasn’t. As happens in summer heat waves, the wind fell off. But we pay for it in our electric bills whether the turbines spin or not. And never mind that the things are killing off eagles, we’ve still got to build transmission lines to get the power to where it is needed when the turbines do spin.
Then there are the ethanol subsidies and mandates. Remember ethanol? It was the renewable fuel that would end our reliance on foreign oil and fossil fuels. This may be the worst of them all. I could write a book on all that’s wrong with it. It’s corrosive in engines and, as mandates increase, more and more of us will have to buy new automobiles we wouldn’t otherwise need, or foot major repair bills. It gets lousy mileage but that hasn’t stopped the little green men from forcing through increased mileage standards. We may actually be about to end the subsidies (I’m not holding my breath) but between still increasing mandates and sky high gasoline prices that probably won’t end the massive diversion of cropland to corn with it’s concomitant runoff into the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi. Two years ago people even began to notice ethanol was making the world hunger problem worse.
And so it goes. Everywhere you look in the modern environmental movement there is another bad idea and misplaced priority. But nowhere is it written that the crazies always have to get control. And there are some things we could do that make sense. Maryland seems to be making progress cleaning up the Chesapeake. Maybe we could start to do something about the dead zone, an environmental catastrophe in the gulf far far worse than any oil spill ever was.
Maybe we could even put a few people back to work, really. There are jobs going begging because companies can’t find people qualified to fill them. They come with career paths and benefit packages. They are opportunities for rewarding work over many years. They aren’t necessarily in new industries either. They are often in well understood fields like nursing, vehicle maintenance, even trucking and they don’t all require many years of training and experience to develop the needed skills. Our community colleges and trade schools know how to prepare people for them and it doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per job. Why in heavens name aren’t we addressing this? There are even a few work force development programs that have proved effective. Let’s identify them and get the right people into them. A few more people buying homes and paying taxes would work wonders. But first we have to stop the madness.
As the Solyndra scandal continues to unfold I’m beginning to think it may finally begin to bring some sanity to this quasi-religious push for green energy. If you haven’t been following it in the news, Solyndra is the solar panel maker that got a $500+ million government loan guarantee, used the money to build a huge new factory, and promptly filed for bankruptcy. Turns out it was costing them $6 a pop to build panels that were on the market for less than $2. It was obvious before they got the guarantee that their business plan wasn’t viable. At least it was obvious to any analyst who bothered to look.
Colossal waste has become a familiar theme in the green energy business. We pour billions into obscenely expensive technologies that don’t work, are known to be unreliable, and have undesirable economic and ecological side effects. Often justified as jobs creators, what few jobs materialize are either overseas or come with eye popping costs. Solyndra is just one spectacular example.
Another one that should be getting more attention is the Texas wind boondoggle. Texas has more wind generating capacity than any other state, a lot more. Our politicians have been falling all over themselves to promote it. Boone Pickens invested a fortune in it. Boone learned his lesson but taxpayers (and rate payers) continue to invest. Drive down I 45 toward Houston and you will see a steady stream of trucks hauling turbine blades north, all of them imported by ship from China, the same China where the $2 solar panels are made. But a funny thing happened. We had a brutally hot summer in Texas. Air conditioning demand peaked at levels dangerously near grid capacity. Where was the wind-generated electricity? It wasn’t. As happens in summer heat waves, the wind fell off. But we pay for it in our electric bills whether the turbines spin or not. And never mind that the things are killing off eagles, we’ve still got to build transmission lines to get the power to where it is needed when the turbines do spin.
Then there are the ethanol subsidies and mandates. Remember ethanol? It was the renewable fuel that would end our reliance on foreign oil and fossil fuels. This may be the worst of them all. I could write a book on all that’s wrong with it. It’s corrosive in engines and, as mandates increase, more and more of us will have to buy new automobiles we wouldn’t otherwise need, or foot major repair bills. It gets lousy mileage but that hasn’t stopped the little green men from forcing through increased mileage standards. We may actually be about to end the subsidies (I’m not holding my breath) but between still increasing mandates and sky high gasoline prices that probably won’t end the massive diversion of cropland to corn with it’s concomitant runoff into the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi. Two years ago people even began to notice ethanol was making the world hunger problem worse.
And so it goes. Everywhere you look in the modern environmental movement there is another bad idea and misplaced priority. But nowhere is it written that the crazies always have to get control. And there are some things we could do that make sense. Maryland seems to be making progress cleaning up the Chesapeake. Maybe we could start to do something about the dead zone, an environmental catastrophe in the gulf far far worse than any oil spill ever was.
Maybe we could even put a few people back to work, really. There are jobs going begging because companies can’t find people qualified to fill them. They come with career paths and benefit packages. They are opportunities for rewarding work over many years. They aren’t necessarily in new industries either. They are often in well understood fields like nursing, vehicle maintenance, even trucking and they don’t all require many years of training and experience to develop the needed skills. Our community colleges and trade schools know how to prepare people for them and it doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per job. Why in heavens name aren’t we addressing this? There are even a few work force development programs that have proved effective. Let’s identify them and get the right people into them. A few more people buying homes and paying taxes would work wonders. But first we have to stop the madness.
Labels: ethanol, Green energy, jobs, Solyndra, wind energy
posted by Onfoot at 7:40 AM
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