"The trouble is now the thought-experimenters are creating policy"

Thorium nuclear power advocate John Kutsch just narrated the perfect anecdote to the overly-enthusiastic renewable energy crowd.

Not hiding his frustration in the least, Kutsch went at this from a pro-science perspective. That's what made this video really sing. Sadly, too many critics of solar and wind power destroy their own credibility by denying the reality of man-made global warming. Instead, Kutsch took that issue head on and the video maker backed up what he said with more arguments for why our current crop of renewables won't help the environment and won't scale.

He even made a dig 19 minutes in at the local power source crowd. A subsection of the buy local crowd, these people thing power should be produced locally, even if it's incredibly expensive and wasteful.

Kutsch does a great job of reeling in nonsense. Every moment is worth watching.
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Solar Roadways are still an awful idea

A few days ago I wrote that the "solar roadways" project, which has raised nearly $2 million at this time from the public, is a terrible idea.

It's still a terrible idea, and I'm glad to see even more people are speaking out. While I think good criticism stands on it's own merits, I'm glad to see environmentalists speaking out about this bad idea. In the first post I shared a 2009 criticism from Treehugger.com, and now Shea Gunther of Mother Nature Network has chimed in with a fresh piece of criticism:

The Solar Roadways website is light on numbers when it comes to costs and for good reason — as soon as you actually run the numbers, this project becomes completely untenable. It costs more money, produces less electricity at a higher cost, and introduces major new complexities into an already complex transportation system. The numbers won’t lie... 

Technically speaking, the video is a work of art. It obviously accomplished its purpose of bringing in the Indigogo dollars and has been shared far and wide on social media. But the video’s technical mastery doesn’t change the fact that the technology being described within is a bad and sketchy solution in search of a problem. 

The United States does not suffer for lack of space to mount solar panels. Just look up. There are millions of rooftops just waiting for solar panel installations to say nothing of the range of wide-open spaces found throughout America.

Defenders of the project keep promising that the technical issues are possible to solve. That may be true, from an engineering standpoint, but it doesn't mean it's smart from an economic standpoint.

I'm reminded of the first Game of Thrones book where King Robert's council is discussing hiring a Faceless Man to assassinate Daenerys Targaryen, and Littlefinger chimes in that it would be cheaper to hire a band of mercenaries to kill her. While the flashy supernatural shapeshifter approach is appealing on an emotion level, the rank and file soldiers would get the job done without breaking the bank.

By the way, while it's good that the crowd sourcing project is only taking the money of people who want to waste it, the solar roadway creators have already received $100,000 of the public's money through a federal grant. That's a complete scandal.
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Solar Roadways are a terrible idea.

I've long thought the buzz over the solar panel technology we have available now is idealistic nonsense and clueless wishful thinking.

Well, someone just brought that up an order of magnitude with the aggravatingly-popular Solar Roadways video, which says we should replace roads with glass-covered solar panels and use them to light and heat our roads.

I've seen a lot of people that I thought were reasonable jump on board this foolish bandwagon. Paradoxically, it was the folks at Treehugger.com who put it in its place five years ago when the idea last came up by comparing it to something a 12 year old would dream up for a science fair project.

I honestly don't have the time to knock down all of the flaws in this plan. The numbers and costs are kept purposely vague, and economic concerns are waved off with a classic vulgar Keynesian pitch that says sinking all of our resources into this boondoggle will generate more money then it uses. It won't, but let's move on.

Lighting up the roads and heating them to melt snow sounds like it would consume much more power than it generates. Those flashy road pictures seem to sway some people, but the major selling point with this pipe dream is that we would save the space used by solar arrays by embedding the solar panels into existing road space.

While saving space is a good thing, the costs involved are astounding.

We'd have to put a lot resources into embedding the solar panels into a substance hardy enough to be driven on by a tractor trailer truck, which will make them more expensive and reduce the amount of light that hits the solar cells. We'd also have to care a great deal about clearing away the dust, dirt and tire marks that build up on the panels. Scratches on the surface will also reduce their ability to generate power.

Plus driving on these things creates new problems. They want the surface to be textured, but that will create havoc for plow trucks. Asphalt is expensive to install and maintain as it is, and it can be poured. This stuff is embedded with circuitry and can't simply be patched with more asphalt.

The creators of the idea claim that these things can all be solved, but they never say at what price. Even if I thought solar panels were a great idea, I wouldn't support making them more expensive and less productive just to save a little space.

On the plus side, at least the pitch video is childish and annoying.
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Local solar is not a virtue in dark New England

Driving through Northampton, Massachusetts today I saw a banner that read "Keep Solar Local."

Solar pride is a common groan-inducing sight in the bay state. Massachusetts is filthy with solar panels, and not because this is a good place to make energy from the sun. In fact, it's a lousy place with long, dark winters. Bright deserts make great locations for solar arrays, but that assumes your goal is to produce energy. If you goal is to make a profit from government subsidies and you don't care how much energy you produce then Massachusetts is a great place to install them.

However, it turns out the "Keep Solar Local" campaign is really a campaign to do business with a single solar installer simply because it is "local." That company, Northeast Solar, is actually from Hatfield, a neighboring and therefore competing municipality, but they don't seem to care because it's more local than anyone else.

On its website Northeast Solar claims "We can provide competitive pricing today" but a recent article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette shows the company started this campaign when they couldn't compete in a fair bidding process:

Gregory Garrison, president of Northeast Solar in Hatfield, argues this is a short-sighted decision that does not help the state’s Clean Energy Center meet its self-described mandate to create high-quality jobs and economic growth through its renewable energy programs. 

He said these goals cannot be accomplished by selecting the lowest bidder within a Solarize community, whose intent is only to drive down costs and install as much solar as possible.

The emphasis was added by me, of course.

When a company can't compete with superior service or lower prices they resort to phony localist economic claims as a hail Mary play.
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Obama's views on Chinese trade make no sense

The week President Barack Obama complained that China is subsidizing some of its automobile exports, and this government funding breaks competition.

Keep in mind is the same president who bragged about bailing out the incompetent General Motors automobile company during the State of the Union address and put a $7,500 tax credit on the American-made Chevy Volt. He even toyed with the idea of raising that amount to $10,000.

Previously, President Obama howled that China was being unfair when it subsidized solar panels and slapped tariffs on the imports, even though he had made subsidizing and tax breaks to American "green" energy companies a central plank in his campaign. He also supported Quantitative Easing 2 after accusing China of manipulating the trade value of the yuan.

President Obama's views on international trade with China make as much sense as chocolate-covered dog treats. All three foot-stomping episodes were example of Chinese taxpayers subsidizing the purchases of American consumers, but he treated them as acts of war.

Granted, I'm used to ignorance of international trade being part of public policy, but did the O-man really have to go the extra mile and mix hypocrisy in too?

About 15 years ago liberal economists like Larry Summers and Paul Krugman would be ridiculing these oafish episodes. Today, they sit quietly on the sidelines out of fear of harming the progressive movement even while the president trips over his own clown shoes.
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Why are we supposed to support solar panels again?

Mike Munger nailed this issue last week. Solar panels are supposed to be about providing clean energy, not make-work jobs to keep idle hands busy. So why did the Commerce Department recently announce an upcoming tariff on Chinese solar panels?

As I wrote back in September when U.S. Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) was beating the same war drums:

This is the kind of garbage you get when you put economic illiterates in positions of power. Wyden is just the latest in a long line of fools who say they want Americans to use environmentally-friendly energy sources, but when Chinese tax payers offer to pay part of the bill, these so-called environmentalists spaz out and threaten to place higher taxes on American consumers.

Solar panels are being implemented recklessly. They cause pollution when they are manufactured and break down within a few decades. Some of the regions they are put in aren't particularly sunny, so they never provide much electricity. It's a technology with a lot of potential, but installing them now is like spreading frosting on cake batter.

But Munger doesn't think any of that matters. He submits that solar panels are not about generating electricity.

This is not an environmental policy at all. It is an industrial policy (thinly) disguised as an environmental policy. We have decided that US corporations need to receive lots of extra dollars from consumers, and from taxpayers, so they will have enough cash to contribute to the Obama reelection campaign.

Is he right? It depends on one's perspective. From the view of the ordinary people I know who support solar, they really are motivated by environmentalist pipe dreams. However, from the perspective of the dark crypts of Washington DC, I think Munger's view is correct.

Remember loyal reader, there are Baptists who want to do well, but there's usually a few bootleggers hiding behind them pushing them along.
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