I am not against alternative forms of energy. I am against the government picking winners and losers. If one listens to the climate change alarmists and the lame-stream media one gets the distinct impression that “the world has moved smartly and seamlessly toward 21st century green energy while the U.S. is the high-polluting laggard that just won’t get with the program to save the planet (see Moore article below).”
Not so. The Green energy movement has been anything but “seamless” and “successful.” To paraphrase Flip Wilson (if any of you are old enough to remember), “Do duh name ‘Solyndra’ ring a familiar note?”
[Sources: Germany’s “Silent Catastrophe” …330,000 Households See Power Turned Off In One Year! By P. Gosselin and Europe’s Lesson Teaches Us: Don’t Go Green, by Stephen Moore]
For example, the German government has legally mandated that significant amounts of wind and solar power must be part of their energy economy. And what has been the result of this “brilliant plan?” The German press reports that “energy poverty” is now engulfing their nation.
What is causing this massive problem, ask you? Simple, answer I. The government thinks they know more than the free enterprise system… but THEY DON’T!
The problem is Germany’s skyrocketing electricity prices. Currently regular household consumers are paying nearly 30 cents a kilowatt-hour – almost three times the rate paid in the USA. Many households are no longer able to afford electricity. More than 330,000 households in Germany have seen their electricity cut off over the past year alone.
And who is suffering the most? The hardest are households on welfare. Not only have the poor been broadsided by the high electricity prices, but so have energy intensive industries. Over the past years a number of German plants have been moving their operations to less expensive locations abroad. Traditional power companies have also been getting creamed, seeing billions in losses and thousands of layoffs. Perhaps, as President Trump’s energy policy results in the US having the world’s lowest unsubsidized energy prices, manufacturing enterprises will flood back to the USA.
The 330,000 German households that lost their electricity, while serious, is only a drop in the proverbial bucket. Power companies threatened 6.2 million with loss of service! Toss in 44,000 households that saw their natural gas turned off and one can easily see that my original premise is correct.
Other nations are also faring poorly with their “green energy” schemes. [From the Moore article] In Britain, to comply with renewable energy requirements, power stations are burning hundreds of millions of pounds of wood pellets (pellets imported from the U.S.). Environmental experts confirm that burning wood is much worse for the environment than burning natural gas or even coal.
Australia, another “green energy” leader, saw its electricity prices skyrocket this past winter. According to an analysis by the Institute for Energy Research, power costs surged unbelievably — from $100 per megawatt-hour to $10,000 per megawatt-hour. This was because of heavy dependence on an unreliable renewable energy program. The government had to reopen one of its shuttered natural-gas plants to keep prices from further exploding.
Sweden announced a decade ago that it was all-in on green energy, and the government launched a wind-power program. Embarrassingly, Swedish politicians now have had to acknowledge the program has become so expensive and inefficient that the government will phase out the subsidies lavished on the industry.
As I said above, governments think they know more than the free enterprise system… but THEY DON’T!
And thanks to HP for sending the Gosselin to me.
Roy Filly
The Rugged Individualist 
Gee! What a surprise! Back in the 1970’s RCA engineers showed how mass generation of electricity by solar was financially unfeasible and would also lead to an incredible waste in land use. For example, to generate enough power just for the state of California, the entire states of Arizona and New Mexico would have to be completely covered with panels. A full-time crew of 1000 was estimated to be needed just to keep them clean. This was based on laboratory- made cells of single-crystal silicon which had an efficiency near the physical limit of 21%. Today’s commerical polycrystalline silicon cells have a maximum efficiency of 13%. In reality, I would guess perhaps panels are about 11% efficient. RCA management wanted to go into the solar cell business, but they read the reports and decided no-go. Too bad the government did not read or heed the reports as well..