Free Republic

Veterans Administration hospitals have spent at least $420 million on solar panels and windmills while vets wait months — or even lay dying — to see a doctor. In total, VA hospitals reported 23 deaths due to 76 instances of delayed care, an April 2014 VA fact sheet said. Then on June 5, Acting Veteran Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson revealed that at least 18 Phoenix patients died while waiting for treatment on a secret list kept off the books. It is not clear if that number is in addition to the 23 deaths reported earlier. During the past month, the...

Photovoltaic (PV) power is created from a burst of coal-sourced energy priced at 4 cents/kWh, which you get back as an intermittent and declining dribble over the following 20 years at 15 cents/kWh. The numbers vary with location, but the basic relationship remains the same – at best, the energy produced by PV panels is at least four times the cost of the power consumed in making them. That is one thing. The main thing is that over their lifetimes, PV panels now produce slightly more energy than what it took to make them. So a civilization that relies upon...

Rasheed Wallace gained notoriety during his 16-season NBA career for being a hot-headed power forward. If called for a foul (or, as was often the case with him, a technical foul) that he thought was undeserved, and the opposing team missed the ensuing free-throw attempts, Wallace would often holler, “ball don’t lie,” as if the basketball itself was pronouncing judgment on the ref’s call. The “ball don’t lie” expression has gained fame and is even the title of a popular basketball blog. I’d be inclined to adopt a variation on Wallace’s catchphrase for whenever energy use or energy policy is...

Ronald Ace, photographed at his home in Laurel, Maryland, May 4, 2013, said his flat-panel "Solar Traps," which can be mounted on rooftops or used in power plants, will shatter barriers that have stymied efforts to make solar energy cheap, clean and reliable. His claimed discoveries, which exist only on paper so far, would represent such a leap that they're sure to draw skepticism.

Video about a new solar panel technology.

The government is to make drastic changes to its financial support for solar energy farms, in a move condemned by green activists and renewable power companies as likely to reduce the UK's ability to generate low-carbon power and green jobs. The move is being seen as another victory for the Conservative party, many of whom are opposed to what the prime minister has been alleged to call "green crap", such as renewable energy measures that add to consumer bills.

In case you had any doubt about the efficacy of government, just consider the four year struggle to get solar panels on the White House, which has culminated in the breathless announcement that they will now generate the power to run all of six light bulbs. Here’s the pivotal sentence of the announcement: And while the energy produced by the White House panels may not be all too significant—they’ll generate an estimated 6.3 kilowatts worth of energy—the message it sends is. Oh good another “symbolic” achievement by Obama – he’s getting great at those! Not so much at actual achievements,...

Well it seems the President is still trying to keep up appearances. This week the Obama administration completed the installation of new solar panels on top of the White House. It was almost 30 years ago that Reagan removed the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had built on top of the president’s residence, but shockingly enough, President Obama has once again ruined everything Reagan created. This is a reminder to the American people that President Obama is supposed to be a big proponent of stopping climate change. According to a White House spokesman, “Continuing President Obama’s commitment to lead by...

For the all the praise solar power gets for being “cleaner” than traditional energy resources, there sure are a lot of hazardous materials involved in the process. When a solar panel manufacturer goes out of business – like the bankrupt Abound Solar in northern Colorado – a costly cleanup of toxic materials must ensue. So what happens when no one jumps to cleanup all that cancer-causing cadmium? Environmental protests? Rep. Jared Polis funded ballot initiatives banning solar plants from Colorado? Actually, none of the above. Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway and Rep. Cory Gardner seem to be the only voices...

Utility customers who want to install rooftop solar panels or small wind turbines could face extra charges on their bills after legislation passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives on Monday. Senate Bill 1456 passed 83-5 after no debate in the House. It passed the Senate last month and now heads to Gov. Mary Fallin for her approval. The bill was supported by the state’s major electric utilities, but drew opposition from solar advocates, environmentalists and others. It sets up a process at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to establish a separate customer class and monthly surcharge for distributed generation such as...

Environmental mitigation necessary for a planned solar power project may have motivated the federal Bureau of Land Management’s decision to launch a military-style armed enforcement action against a Nevada cattle rancher, government documents reveal. According to the documents, BLM determined continued cattle grazing would interfere with the Bureau’s plans to use the land as an environmental mitigation area for desert tortoise disruption caused by the solar facility. In 1993, the BLM designated hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands in Nevada for conservation to protect desert tortoises. The BLM told rancher Cliven Bundy—whose family had raised cattle on the...

Now, here’s something you won’t here on the mainstream news. Fracking has eliminated CO2 more than more than all of the solar panels and wind turbines in the world. John Stossel at FOX News reported: On my TV show this week, statistician Bjorn Lomborg points out that “air pollution kills 4.3 million people each year … We need to get a sense of priority.” That deadly air pollution happens because, to keep warm, poor people burn dung in their huts. Yet, time and again, environmentalists oppose the energy production most likely to make the world cleaner and safer. Instead, they...

WASHINGTON — The political attack ad that ran recently in Arizona had some familiar hallmarks of the genre, including a greedy villain who hogged sweets for himself and made children cry. But the bad guy, in this case, wasn't a fat-cat lobbyist or someone's political opponent. He was a solar-energy consumer. Solar, once almost universally regarded as a virtuous, if perhaps over-hyped, energy alternative, has now grown big enough to have enemies. The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the nation's largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor...

A disturbing story out of the Sooner State this week, noted by Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway. Under the terms of a recently passed bill, expected to be signed by Governor Mary Fallin, homeowners who install their own private solar or wind turbine energy resources and sell some of the juice back to energy companies will be paying a fee for the privilege.

~snip~ "Let there be light," said the Lord. And there was light and there was energy, and there was solar energy for all of us. You and I are born equal under the sun, with equal rights to the use of our sun's energy. Unless the path in the delivery of solar energy changes, some of us will be making rent payments to some of our neighbors for the use of solar electricity for the rest of our lives, making the wealth divide even more isolating. This article attempts to throw some light on this reality. The fossil fuels that...

“There’s nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.” – William James “A lie told enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin Perhaps the most frequently used logical fallacy in the world of politics and public policy today is the argument of assertion, or the idea that someone can legitimately argue a point by merely declaring that something is true, regardless of contradiction. Thus far in 2014, the solar lobby and environmental activists have together employed this strategy to attack ALEC as a legislative membership organization and our stance on the issue of net...

During my last bombshell blog post, I chronicled the Spanish conglomerate Abengoa that snagged billions of U.S. green energy stimulus funds, exposing how this foreign-owned entity screwed over American taxpayers, workers and vendors. This included a long wrap sheet of chilling, unethical and potentially criminal activity that only came to light due to the testimony, coupled with substantiated documentation, by a whistleblower, whom had worked for Abengoa for three years, from 2010 until 2013. In summary Abengoa: Violated at least the spirit of the 2009-stimulus law as well as the Department of Energy (DOE) loan stipulations Conspired and blatantly broke...

PRIMM, Nevada – As part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above approach to energy, today Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar “flipped the switch” on the Enbridge Silver State North solar project, the first large-scale solar energy facility on U.S. public lands to deliver power to American consumers. This milestone is in line with the administration’s broad commitment to expanding production of all sources of American made energy, including from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, which has doubled in the President’s first term, as well as domestic production of oil and gas resources, which have increased each year the President...

The standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) deescalated on April 12, when the bureau announced that it will stop its operation to confiscate Bundy’s cattle.But another aspect to this ongoing story is jumping: The blogosphere is alive with allegations that Senator Harry Reid (pictured), and his son, Rory, have motivations of their own for wanting Bundy’s cattle off the disputed lands.Though the major media announced that a “deal” had been reached between Bundy and the BLM, Bundy explained what transpired differently in an interview with KLAS TV in Las Vegas: “There is...

During the final standoff at the Bundy Ranch on Saturday, we had a hundred or more militarized government agents and snipers aiming military grade weapons at hundreds of innocent American citizens. And they were being ordered through a public address system to move away or they would be "SHOT!" Their crime? Standing in defense of a Nevada citizen who was being ruthlessly tormented by rogue federal agencies over a twenty year period. The fact that the BLM seemed to be perfectly willing to slaughter innocent Americans using military grade weapons and tactics over “grazing fees” on public lands is a...