Last week, when solar power manufacturer Amonix announced it was closing its North Las Vegas location, it immediately became political fodder. U.S. Sen. Dean Heller used it as an occasion to slam Rep. Shelley Berkley over the issue of unpopular stimulus spending.
“Congresswoman Berkley, when you voted for the trillion-dollar stimulus, you promised it would create 34,000 jobs in Nevada. Nevada lost jobs. Congresswoman Berkley, you pushed $6 million in funding to a company that has created zero long-term jobs for Nevada. Congresswoman, it’s time. It’s time for you to admit the stimulus — and your policies — aren’t working,” said Chandler Smith, Heller for Senate spokeswoman.
Turns out, not so much.
According to this Friday story in the Review-Journal, Amonix never used the nearly $6 million in tax credits available under the administration of President Barack Obama. Taxpayer losses were apparently confined to a 2007 grant of $15.6 million, issued under former President George W. Bush‘s administration. So if Heller (or, more particularly, Heller’s campaign) has a problem, it’s with the former president’s Energy Department policies, not with President Obama’s.
Now, surely you can cite failures on Obama’s watch, too. As I’ve said before, these things will happen as we grope our way inevitably toward a clean energy future. The government surely will have a role in research and development of new technologies, and part of that involves the risk of failure.
I like what Rhone Resch, president and chief executive officer of Solar Energy Industries Association, had to say about the matter, from the story linked above: “America can’t afford to cede yet another high-tech industry and its jobs to China, Europe or elsewhere while we waste time on political arm-wrestling,” he said. “Today, solar powers our critical infrastructure — military bases, hospitals and schools — as well as homes and companies in every state. Solar is one of our nation’s many great energy resources, working for Republicans and Democrats alike.”
Amen.
Was there this much fuss when Mitt Romney had his own Solyndra? Romney was Massachusett’s governor when a Bay State solar panel developer landed a state loan from Mitt Romney. It went belly up – a day after the GOP presidential hopeful ripped President Obama’s green-energy investments. Lowell-based Konarka Technologies announced that it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and ceased operations, laying off its 85 workers and liquidated.
Just more reason for me to keep harping on Natural Gas. Its the bridge this country absolutely cannot avoid and must travel to make its way into that potential future. Currently the price of gas is offsetting the sky high price of Solar and Wind.
There is plenty of blame for all sides in politics, if this country cannot get past it and realize this is another moment of national crisis requiring unity (not the one sided unity of political emotion) it will be a sad day.
The difference in this crisis and the ones previous, this one is more like creeping crud than a sneak attack.
I absolutely agree that natural gas should replace coal. In fact, it has. We’re generating as much electricity with gas as we are coal. And look at the carbon savings. Over the last several years the United States government, Europe and China have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on clean-energy research and deployment. Despite some high-profile flops, like ethanol and Solyndra (under funded), the investments are succeeding more than they are failing. The price of solar and wind power have both fallen sharply in the last few years. This country’s largest wind farm, sprawling across eastern Oregon, is scheduled to open next month. Iowa is a leader in wind power, which provides about 20 percent of the state’s total electricity, as well as the thousands of jobs that go with it. Already, the world uses vastly more alternative energy than experts predicted only a decade ago. We need to add more nuclear in the mix.
There are just too many solar plant failures to get into the ones in Massachusetts alone. Those don’t get that much attention because they are nowhere near as high profile as Solyndra.
Nukes are a trouble because all the plants built in the USA are different from one another. A problem in one cannot fix the same problem in another. Believe it or not France got this right in the 70′s, we should follow their lead. Up to and including Yucca Mountain. Waste should be reprocessed and the high level waste should be interred in that multi-billion dollar hole in our state.
Gas is the one thing the USA has in abundance and gas will be the future for the next 100 years or so. Solar will probably catch up by then. I do like the molten salt technology being tried now and I hope it proves stable. But once again solar remains in the expirement stage and if its not treated as such it will bite, and it will bite hard.
Like green energy? Look up Via Motors on the web. These are hybrids I call worth while.
I’ve been involved in several varying solar technology deployments and typically, it is not the technology that causes the problem, rather the ignorance of the 3rd party designers, installers and inspectors. Solar isn’t rocket science, but if you do not have a firm grasp of DC current and it’s inversion to AC, then you will have fires, arc flash incidents and non-working power plants. A basic non-tracking flat plate design will typically run flawlessly for 20+ years with minimal maintenance. Granted, utility scale deployment of simple solar technology consumes a lot of land, however it is usually in an area that the land is not much good for anything else. Once deployed, the impact on the bugs and bunnies is practically null, and in my experience, if not properly installed, it creates a shelter and a snack (unprotected wiring)for our furry friends.
Its not so much using the panels, its the manufacture that causes difficulties.
The waste byproducts are very poisonous but no one wants to know about that so it gets kicked aside. As more panels are demanded this will become an exponentially larger problem.
It’s obvious Big Oil and Big Coal have a stake in having the public believe that there is no alternative to ever more drilling, digging, and burning. And who employs, funds, and generally shapes the careers of mainstream energy “experts”? Who actually has a seat at the table when international organizations are putting together their scenarios? It doesn’t have to be raw corruption, although there’s that too. It can instead be a matter of creating a mindset. And a lot of that mindset involves the sense that serious, hard-headed men think in terms of big extractive projects, that solar, wind, and conservation are hippie stuff — a sense that persists even in the teeth of contrary evidence. (NY Times).
When it comes to poisoning the air and water, there’s nothing like oil and coal. It’s the very reason you saw – and still see – Big Oil backed Republican Presidential candidates wanting to do away with the Environmental Protection Agency. Their motive is now to dump mercury directly into the nation’s rivers rivers and into the very air you breathe.
God Help Us!
The Amonix 7700 was never designed to make electricity, it was designed to take Amonix to an IPO. There never was a tested and proven 7700 8th generation tracker, and some of the logic used in the production of the tracker wouldn’t fly with an eigth grade science class!
The proof is in the field, Hatch, Alamosa, and that crap in Spain will all be written off as scrap shortly.
And here we have people wanting to make politics out of this? Fact is, both Democrats and Republicans blindly supported Amonix without ever asking the question, does this stuff really work??
As for the Value of Rhone Resch and his organization.. you’d hope the Solar Industry would do just a little to police itself.. but that doesn’t happen either….so what they good for? promoting more scams?
And Jerry S.. do consider the literal destruction of millions of dollars to make this junk that will be zero benifit to humanity. There was a lot of coal, oil, and more consumed in the creation of the wealth we squandared, and even more to replace it..
This story is not about Amonix alone, it’s also abotu congentrix and nextera, the companies that bought this worthless crap made in Las Vegas. and what kind of loans did the DOE promise them to buy this junk???