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The green insanity that has gripped California policy makers since erstwhile Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor is coming home to roost.
This week the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that two of the state’s public utilities, including Pacific Gas & Electric, were going to stop buying electrical power from the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mohave desert. The purchases had been locked in when the plant started operating in 2014 but it hasn’t worked—one reason: not enough sun in the desert. There have been a myriad of other problems.
The project uses huge arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight on giant towers where the energy boils water to create steam that then is used to generate power. The plant came online in 2014 and President Obama celebrated the green initiative in what otherwise was habitat for a few creatures near the California-Nevada line off Interstate 15. The project proved very successful at frying birds—to the expected horror of the Audubon Society and other wildlife defenders, but their protests went nowhere in the rush to renewable power.
It’s worthwhile to remember just how much taxpayer money went into this project with reporting by the Las Vegas Review Journal and James Freeman’s column in the Wall Street Journal. Obama’s Administration put a stunning $1.6 billion taxpayer dollars into the bird fryer not including a variety of tax credits and other breaks and a $535 million grant to pay back a loan that already was federally guaranteed.
Yes, that’s not a misprint. Paying off a loan that already is federally backed. Only in government. Remind you of Solyndra? How many other of these green scams have the Obama and Biden administrations supported around the country that have not seen sunlight in public?
Another note on the green front: the state air board retreated from its absurd push to eliminate diesel-powered tractor trucks in California. It was in tune with the board’s notion of requiring electric locomotives in place of diesel-powered engines—the trains have not been developed. Electric trucks exist and, for some uses such as local deliveries, could make economic and practical sense. The notion of long-haul electric likely will never come to pass or take a quantum leap in battery technology.
It’s worth remembering that trucks are designed to carry heavy loads and the weight of the battery diminishes either the weight of the payload or the delivery range.
The air board dropped its requirement a week before Donald Trump was sworn in as president seeing the writing on the wall for a regulation that may have made someone feel good, but was doomed to fail.
Well said Tim and you can add the bulletin train to nowhere to the list of impractical and un needed projects that we the taxpayers have funded! Keep up the good work my friend Mark Triska