Posted by Tina
The environmentalists have gotten away with touting their clean energy solutions for decades without actually having to prove the workability of the products they endorse…at least until now. President Obama and Governor Brown have both pushed for alternative energy solutions to problems in the environment that have been grossly overstated. Now that they are up and running, or not as the case may be, we can finally begin to evaluate their effectiveness in the real world. Some reports indicate the people have made a disastrous bargain in bending to the will of wacky extremist voices on the left. Poor management and unwise investment of taxpayer dollars by Democrats in power not only adds to pollution of the environment but spells a failure of leadership investment of precious taxpayer dollars.
This morning in The Denver Post:
Colorado health and environment officials have ordered Loveland-based Abound Solar, the bankrupt solar-panel maker, to clean up hazardous waste at four Front Range locations.
The Abound facilities are storing thousands of “unsellable” solar panels and thousands of gallons of toxic liquids, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reports.
Cadmium, a known carcinogen, is the polluting element burning this failing company. The cost of cleaning up is estimated at $2.2 million. Since this company only exists because it was given a sizable government loan guarantee, of which it spent $70 million, it is pretty sad that when the bankruptcy dust settles taxpayer will still be on the hook for between $40 and $60 million.
Paul Taylor examines the findings in a report by the Pacific Research Institute:
According to PRI:
• The renewable mandate represents a new 27% tax on power generation in the state due to the forced substitution of expensive renewables power in place of cheaper electricity, particularly in terms of transmission, backup, and generation costs;
• The embedded tax to be imposed upon the California economy will grow each year as the size of the electricity market expands and the RPS requirement forces ever-greater amounts of high-cost power onto the market;
• The costs to California electric power consumers by 2020 will rise by more than 13% as a result of the renewables mandate;
• The aggregate effect of these regulations will cause power rates and costs to rise nearly 33 percent between now and 2020, according to the PRI report;
• PRI notes that even without the RPS, state power rates would rise by nearly 20% due to various capital investments driven by both economic and regulatory factors, including those due to the state’s go-it-alone carbon cap-and-trade program.
Green madness mandates known as the “Renewable Power Standard” will cost Californians an additional $5 billion by 2020. If that news isn’t shocking enough during this stinkin’ economy consider a reported in the Los Angeles Times in December 2012:
The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the California grid.
On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades — or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1% of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.
As is true on many days in California when multibillion-dollar investments in wind and solar energy plants are thwarted by the weather, the void was filled by gas-fired plants like the Delta Energy Center.
One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the state is not yet prepared to meet — is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to produce one-third of California’s electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel plants.
Energy experts suggest this extreme approach to energy will cost Californians in the billions of dollars in years to come while creating a greater demand from the very cheap clean energy sources they are claiming to eliminate. The people will pay for the debacle that the greens have foisted with lies and exaggerations of untested ideas.
Wind energy and solar energy are noisy, polluting, wasteful, unreliable, and serve mainly as a political tool rather than as a real benefit to the people or the earth. Gee, maybe that’s why we rejected these alternative sources of energy way back in the day when sanity and smarts still had some influence in decision making.
Visit this informative site for links to many articles on the utter failure of green energy to deliver as promised.