Photo image of the day

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This was the scene last week on Harbor Dr. here in San Diego and it was a symbol of the efficacy of green/alternative energy in its current state.


(please click to enlarge... the camera-in-phone did not cooperate on the first take)

This is a wind turbine blade on Harbor Drive here in San Diego. Transported on a big ol' flat bed towed by a big ol' diesel and escorted by a couple of chase vehicles. They do have a tendency to tie-up things on Harbor as they are matriculating their way down the street. Problem is - it's heading the wrong way. Instead of heading out to the desert or east county where the bird-wacking turbine farms are, it's heading back towards the 10th St. terminal from whence it came. Whatever the problem is, it's a pretty costly mistake. Not that the wind and solar industries probably care - they're the chosen ones. Check out the subsidies granted to these two sectors as compared to other engergy sectors:

Not too shabby, huh? Maybe when the government decides to stop conferring 1% status on not-yet-market-ready technologies and stops depending upon places like China with their deplorable environmental policies for the lithium needed for wind and solar, perhaps we can avoid scenes like the above.


Time's short... we'll have an update later.

Is "Government investment" a paradox?

"Felony dumb"

That from Brian Bilbray (R-CA) on the Department of Energy's decision to give Solyndra over a half billion in tax dollar money to...

- invest in the production of the risky and not-yet-ready-for-primetime thin film technology solar panels instead of the less efficient but far-cheaper polycrystalline panels that the Chinese produce exclusively.

- manufacture solar panels in the onerous regulatory regime of California where electricity rates are twice that of Midwestern states like Ohio.

- manufacture solar panels on one of the most expensive pieces of land in the country.

- manufacture solar panels in a completely unnecessary new building when there were plenty of existing Bay Area facilities that could've been retro-fitted or rented.

Add all this up and it doesn't seem like a business plan that would attract a whole lot of private investment dollars and this also helps explain how it is that the government funded it.

There are essentially 4 ways how money is spent and they are as follows (in descending order of efficiency: 1) you spend your own money on yourself 2) you spend your own money on someone else 3) you spend someone else's money on yourself and 4) you spend someone else's money on someone else.


Take a wild guess as to which number best describes how government spends money? If you chose #4, move yourself to the head of the class.


There was simply no incentive for the government to get a quality product at the lowest possible price (#1) and this helps explain the inherent inefficiencies with government subsidies. And when the government has no real skin in the game, they invariably leave themselves open to other incentives such as graft and political favortism which very well may be the case with Solyndra...

... not that Solyndra's big wigs are going to let on to any of that.


Please remember this the next time you hear a pol prattle on about "government investments"... it simply does not work by the same rules, criteria and desired outcomes that our own personal investments do.

Another great moment in the histroy of crony capitalism (An update)

While the Feds and Congressional committees will be asking the hard questions of just who it was in the administration that signed off on those loans to Solyndra, why don't we just go to the good people of Solyndra themselves as they appear confident as to who gave the go-ahead for that $535 million loan guarantee at below market interest rates.

From Solyndra's website:

Fremont, CA, March 20, 2009 – Solyndra, Inc. announced today that it is the first company to receive an offer for a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) loan guarantee under Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Solyndra, a Fremont, California-based manufacturer of innovative cylindrical photovoltaic systems, will use the proceeds of a $535 million loan from the U.S. Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank to expand its solar panel manufacturing capacity in California.

“The leadership and actions of President Barack Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the U.S. Congress were instrumental in concluding this offer for a loan guarantee,” said Solyndra CEO and founder, Dr. Chris Gronet. “The DOE Loan Guarantee Program funding will enable Solyndra to achieve the economies of scale needed to deliver solar electricity at prices that are competitive with utility rates. This expansion is really about creating new jobs while meaningfully impacting global warming.”

(italics, ours)

This was still on their website as of this A.M. (H/T: The Corner)



And when you lose Jon Stewart...

The green jobs boondoggle

How are all those green jobs working out?

Even after fudging numbers and ignoring the huge subsidies, a liberal think tank reports that growth in the alternative-energy sector lags the rest of the economy.

Green jobs were supposed to be our salvation, both for the earth and for the economy, according to the Obama administration. White House policy based on this flawed premise led to offshore and onshore drilling bans and the locking-up of energy-rich lands while huge alternative energy subsidies (aka "investments") found their way into the stimulus and other legislation.

As happens when government tries to pick winners and losers, the government lost — no, we all lost. As has happened in countries such as Spain, this misallocation of resources has succeeded only in stalling our economy as unemployment and debt grow.

In Spain's case, it was found that for every "green" job created, 2.2 jobs were lost in the rest of the economy.

Along comes the Brookings Institution with a report touting the fact that nearly 2.7 million people brought home paychecks in 2010 working in the "clean economy." That's a 3.4% increase in "green jobs" since 2003, and it sounds terrific until you realize the economy as a whole grew at a 4.2% rate over the same period.

As the folks at HotAir.com duly note, Brookings got to its conclusions by including, for example, all mass transit workers regardless of the actual energy source. They also lump in people such as organic farmers and nuclear energy workers, though the greenies have never touted nuclear energy as "clean" or nuclear jobs as "green."

And let's not forget to factor into these job numbers the massive amounts of subsidies (i.e., your tax dollars) that are pumped into the green economy to further prop up these job numbers.

The article cites an Energy Department report which stated that the average subsidy per megawatt-hour for all energy was $1.65. However, for wind and solar that number jumps to $24.

And knowing what we have known and are continuing to find out about ethanol, solar and wind, do those even qualify as green jobs, anymore?

California's own Great Leap Forward?

Beware renewable energy sprawl.

In order for California to meet its mandated goal of generating one-third of its electricity from renewable resources, predominately wind turbines and solar panels, quite a bit of land and natural resources are going to be required in order to achieve that.

California's peak usage is 52,000 megawatts, so one-third of that is 17,000 MW. Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that wind and solar will split production of that 17,000 MW 50/50.

On the solar side, producing 8,500 MW of electricity will require 129 square miles of solar farms, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan. Good thing we've got such a big state, huh? We can park these farms out in the middle of nowhere (which is another problem in of itself which we will address later). Unfortunately, nowhere, like the Ivanpah farm out in the Eastern Mojave had its construction shut down out of concern for the federally-protected desert tortoise.


Wind energy is even worse: in order to produce that 8,500 MW, you would need the equivalent of 70 Manhattans, again, out in the middle of nowhere with the incumbent transmission (loss) problems. Also, wind turbines require about 200 tons of steel each, the production of which has its own sizeable carbon footprint. Contrast that with a natural gas turbine which weighs about 9 tons and there is a 200-1 difference in the the MW generated per ton of steel between the gas turbine and the wind turbine.

And all this time, we thought the green mantra was: Small is beautiful.


Then again, this may all prove to be a moot point since China sits on most of the rare earths required for wind and solar technology and we're supposed to run out of lithium by 2050 anyway.





When thinking of our head-long rush into green energy, we are reminded of China's Great Leap Forward and their head-long rush to become an industrial power. Starting in 1958, 90 million rural peasants were submitted to "backyard steel mills" but with no iron ore or pig iron to throw into their crude smelts, they instead grabbed anything they could; shovels, hoes, picks, axes, pipes, crow bars, wagon hubs and even their own small tractors... any and all iron on the farm. After all, their were mandates and quotas to be met! Suffice to say, the steel produced was virtually useless. And besides worthless steel, what did the central planners of the Chinese communist party have to show for it? Depending upon who you are listening to, between 20 and 30 million dead Chinese.

We're in the best of hands.

It even kind of looks like TOTUS...

... so what the heck are they waiting for?

The Obama administration has nixed the idea of reinstalling solar panels on the White House roof.

Some 32 solar panels were first installed on the executive mansion's roof by then President Jimmy Carter as part of his efforts to tout clean, renewable energy during the 1970s, when the U.S. faced severe shortages and price spikes after an oil embargo by Arab countries. Carter held a rooftop news conference in 1979 to show off the panels and discourage reliance on foreign oil.

The panels were yanked off after Ronald Reagan took office a year later, but they didn't disappear. Instead, some of them have been stored for the past 30 years by environmentalists at Unity College in Maine, where they were used to heat water in the school's cafeteria. Last week, a group of students loaded one of the vintage 6-by-3-foot panels into a biodiesel van headed for Washington.

The group was led by Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org, who described the mission on his blog: "If the president can't climb up on the roof and hammer in some solar panels, clearly we need to push him up."

The technology used in the Carter-era solar panels is now outdated, but a California company called Sungevity offered to outfit the White House with new panels for free. More than 8,000 people have signed on to a Facebook group in support. McKibben appeared on David Letterman's "Late Show" last week to plug the effort as well.

What does it say about an administration that they, after constantly lecturing the rest of us country classers on the noble and moral merits of green power, wouldn't follow through on this easy button-type of substantively meaningless yet highly symbolic gesture?

The article indicates that some inside the administration are skittish about doing so because it may lead to Carter comparisons. That horse has left the barn, folks - and the fact that it's solar panels, for crying out loud, providing the Carter-Obama nexus which has the regime spooked amuses us to no end.

Quote of the day

"Bullying us to step up the pace won't help," said Greg Miller, head of a new team created to speed up the bureau's permitting of renewable energy projects. "We're going to do this right; this land belongs to the American people."

Well, well, well. It’s Green vs. Green as energy companies hoping to become flush with porkulus bucks are lining up to install solar farms in the desert lands of Imperial County east of San Diego but are being held up by bureaucratic red tape and … lawsuits by environmental groups on behalf of lizards, tortoises, big horn sheep and anything else crawling around out there.






Years ago, we were working for a mom’n’pop tug outfit down in the south bay. Via arcane salvage rights laws, the owner of this company owned many of the derelict vessels that used to set in the south end of San Diego Bay. One day, while going through the mail, we opened a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was basically an order to remove all the derelicts as the Corps was going to dredge that portion of the Bay.

The owner started making all the necessary arrangements to clear out the derelicts but before he could, we received a letter from the federal EPA that was a cease and desist order as they had ruled that these abandoned vessels were a water fowl habitat and not to be disturbed.

The owner took the letters from the Corps and the EPA and faxed them respectively to one another. He then kicked his feet up on the desk and said, “Well, I think my work here is done for the day”. For the remainder of our employment (6 months), we did not hear anything further from the two groups.

The Corps must’ve ultimately won out because the derelict vessels were removed several years ago.

P.S. Yes, we know - the windmill isn't a solar panel nor is it a big horn sheep. It was just a cool picture we pulled from the not-ready-for-prime-time alternative energies archive

Because feeling good about yourself is really all that matters

A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.

It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else.

"If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

The GAO report says a plug-in compact car, if recharged at an outlet drawing its power from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4% to 5%. If the feeling of saving the environment from driving an electric car causes people to drive more, that small amount of savings vanishes entirely.

On the bright side of things, at least the demise (for now) of cap and trade will mean we will still have coal-fired plants in which to fire up and which will provide electricity to our death-trap smug-mobiles.

But if cap and trade does manage to resuscitate and effectively kill the coal industry, where is that electricity going to come from? Oh, that’s right. We’ve always got wind and solar power. Unfortunately, those two alternative energies are set with massive inherent drawbacks in their current stage of development.

T. Boone Pickens is sitting on 687 400-feet tall wind turbines as he scratched his plans to “plant” these things out in west Texas. His problem? Getting the power generated to the grid. You see, the fact of the matter with places that are really windy and really sunny (see also: hot), is that no one lives there and right now, the storage and transmission technology is not where it needs to be to in order for wind and solar to be market-competitive. And did we mention that these wind turbine farms have a tendency to make mincemeat of flocks of birds and that solar farms require a massive amount of water, something else in scant supply in hotter climes, in order to keep the panels clean.

Our push for electric power also pushes us further into the hands of some unsavory characters. Half the world’s proven lithium reserves reside in Bolivia whose leftist President is a Hugo Chavez ally.

Hey, we thought this whole alternative energy movement was, in part, so we didn’t have to do business with the planet’s jerk-offs. Sounds like we’re exchanging petrol-dictators for litho-dictators.

We continue charging down the government-mandated green revolution road pursuing these outlandish energy alternatives that aren’t ready for prime-time, do not produce a good return on investment and may in fact be more harmful to the environment than our traditional sources of energy and in the case of ethanol, wreak havoc with the world’s food supplies and prices.

It’s to the point where we are almost forced to cheer for these 300 page amendments that get snuck into bills like cap and trade as these back room deals and concessions signal that the proposed legislation is watered-down to the point of a net zero effect.

Since no one is really interested in the oil reserves setting beneath our feet or nuclear energy, a combination that is real energy indepence, this is all we got.

Programming Alert

We’re off to Vegas tomorrow afternoon/evening and while our last weekend out-of-town was to a more primitive corner of the planet we’ll be in the middle of what is one of the great technological wonders of the planet so we should be capable of blogging from there.

… and speaking of technological wonders here’s the Senator from the great state of Nevada opining on the deleterious effects of the very substance that empowers people from all over the world to travel to the greatest money-making and revenue-generating entity this planet may ever see and one which sits right smack dab in the middle of nowhere…. right in the middle of Harry’s home state.

Perhaps you’ve seen this before but we like to call it “See Harry whine, see Harry whimper, See Harry punt on 3rd down”. Poor ol’ Harry Reid: co-presiding over a legislative body with a 18.5% approval rating and now a YouTube sensation for conceding neither he nor anyone else in that same legislative body has a plan or a clue as to how to lift us out of this latest energy crisis.