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The Tonopah Solar Company in Harry Reid's Nevada is getting a $737 million "loan" from Obama's D.O.E. The Project will produce a 110 Megawatt Power System, and employs l45 permanent workers. That's costing us a mere $5.1 million per job. One of the Investment Partners in this endeavor is Pacific Corporate Group (PCG). The PCG Executive Director is Ron Pelosi, who is the brother to Nancy's husband. First Nancy gets her husband's cannery exempt from minimum wage laws and now this for her brother-in-law. Please, Mr. Obozo, tell me about this transparency in government again.

The sun is the most important energy source on Earth. Solar energy powers the growth of all trees, grasses, herbs, crops and algae; it creates the clouds and powers the storms; it is the source of all hydro, photo-voltaic (PV), solar-thermal, bio-mass, and wind energy. Over geological time, it also creates coal. PV solar panels are useful in remote locations and for some portable applications. With enough panels and batteries, standalone solar can even power homes. But solar energy has five fatal flaws for supplying 24/7 grid power.

Two years ago we were all going about our daily business blissfully unaware that our planet almost plunged into global catastrophe. A recent revelation by NASA explains how on July 23, 2012 Earth had a near miss with a solar flare, or Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), from the most powerful solar storm on the sun in over 150 years, but nobody decided to mention it. Err, what? Well that’s a sobering bit of news. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado. We managed to just avoid the...

On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA. Analysts believe that a direct hit … could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn’t even be able to flush their toilet because urban...

For proponents of renewable energy, it seems like every time a technology is primed to save the world, it gets dogged by some ironic bit of environmental unpleasantness. Wind turbines can be dangerous to birds and bats. Biofuels require so much land, fertilizer, and water that they may use more energy to produce than they provide. Hydropower dams screw up a whole lot of river habitat and stop fish from spawning. The latest on this list of “dark green” technologies is thermal solar power, which is coming into vogue in the southern California desert. [snip]U.S. Fish and Wildlife employees and...

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.