... in CANADA !
There are ZERO good solar PV locations in Canada.
Cloud cover plus angle to the sun just makes it terrible. If interested - Google something like “solar energy potential by geographic location - or something - I used to have a link to the online computers for this. Any high school kid can figure it out.
If this made any sense at all - put the capital in Arizona desert, and trade the electricity back for some hydropower from Niagara Falls.
No one would fund this with their own money - so the government does it - and some politically connected thieves cash in for $500MILLION.
There is a point at which this becomes organized crime - and our government is over that line.
I doubt a fly-by-night boondoggle can do better than old Mother Nature.
So true Eldon. There are few good large scale solar locations anywhere. This is payback to the useful idiots in the environmental movement, part of the constituency of the left who got Obama elected.
Physics and engineering are the problem. With well under 10% efficiency for photovoltaic delivered to customers, the Latitude of Canada, the reality that under the best of circumstances and no water vapor in the atmosphere (water vapor and not CO2 is the dominant greenhouse gas), the average solar energy flux is about 600 watts/square meter. Take a quarter of that at lower latitudes, since quality energy last for six of twenty four hours and you are talking in the vicinity of 10 watts per square meter of collector - for tracking collectors, and not in Canada, where 3 hours of oblique sunlight is a good day during the winter.
Solar is about the redistribution of taxpayer money to socialists, who want to destroy our economy, and pay off another solar technology company, none of which can make money with vast subsidies. State and federal regulators have been redistributing our income by granting "kickbacks" - tax incentives - to companies who will deploy solar collectors. But so many companies are failing, even the regulatory czars can't steal productivity when there is no business. So enviro-nazis are subsidizing their friends. They probably figure that a few hundred million here or there will hardly be missed, what with trillions being spent every few months to boy our own bonds so that the union pension funds don't appear to be under water, and the useful idiots in the SEIU won't notice, until after the next election, that their bosses have destroyed the hosts they all feed on.
For heating water in the the sunbelt or desert, or for powering emergency phones on remote highways, there are some applications which do make economic sense. But large scale solar productions simply doesn't, which doesn't really bother our Science Adviser since his goal is to destroy capitalism so the smart people can run everything.
I was and am a great solar energy advocate. Enlightenment came when a wonderful professor approved a graduate project to write a proposal, including siteing, for modest solar electric plants at four location which I could select. My professor, who spent decades studying thin film technology, was not at all politically biased. He said "Give it your best shot!"
Of course I had to produce somewhat realistic engineering numbers, and had to justify the projects economically. The ideal locations were a long way from Canada, in every way, and were locations where water vapor wouldn't absorb the typical fifty percent of the incident energy that it does in most micro-climates. I explored the the high planes of Peru and Mexico and Brazil. Finally, I learned that the projects were not ones I could have honestly sold to venture capitalists. But anti-capitists find such projects easy to sell to a naive public, to be funded through grants from their government. It's a handy scam because who, besides a very few of us, has ever had a reason to look at the practicality of solar power? It sounds like a nice technology doesn't it? After all, there is the sun, and when it shines, people are happy.
It makes little difference whether photovoltaic or solar thermal electric. Solar energy is about politics, not renewable resources (solar uses enormous quantities), or safety, (solar is enormously more dangerous than nuclear power, no one having ever been hurt from commercial nuclear, and tens of thousands having fallen off of roofs installing and servicing those systems you find all over the US and the middle east on peoples roofs). Not intuitive huh?
The issue with solar energy is intractable. There will never be a higher energy flux from the sun, and it will never be efficient because of that. There will be a few great low-power applications, and applications for which low quality heat is all that is needed, like heating swimming pools or preheating washing water, but most installations today only make sense because other citizens will be paying for the Utopian dreams of the left, whether they want to or not.
:There is a point at which this becomes organized crime - and our government is over that line.”
It’s another money-laundering operation. People at Ex-Im Bank need to be hanged for treason.