Green Energy, Bankrupting The Taxpayer

Posted by Jeff Carter
on October 21st, 2012

Green energy is heavily subsidized. That has created a bunch of lobbyists dedicated to keeping the subsidy alive. Some of the stimulus went to green energy, while at at the same time Obama’s Energy Department, EPA and Department of Justice hamstrung the traditional energy providers with regulations, lawsuits and verbal attacks.

The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:

Evergreen Solar ($24 million)*
SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
Solyndra ($535 million)*
Beacon Power ($69 million)*
AES’s subsidiary Eastern Energy ($17.1 million)
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.5 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
National Renewable Energy Lab ($200 million)
Fisker Automotive ($528 million)
Abound Solar ($374 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($6 million)
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Schneider Electric ($86 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.4 million)*
Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
LSP Energy ($2.1 billion)*
UniSolar ($100 million)*
Azure Dynamics ($120 million)*
GreenVolts ($500,000)
Vestas ($50 million)
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($150 million)
Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
Navistar ($10 million)
Satcon ($3 million)*

The worst is when companies that bundled or donated to Obama, like Solyndra, received subsidies. A real conflict of interest and classic crony capitalism. You might otherwise term such an arrangement as “payola”.

Total bill: $10.195 Billion

The cost to build one nuclear power plant is $6-9 Billion. But, a lot of those costs skyrocketed because of regulation.

The cost to build one coal fired power plant is $2 Billion. Again, costs have skyrocketed because of onerous regulation.

The cost to build one natural gas power plant is $978 per kilowatt of capacity to build and fuel a big gas-fired power plant, compared with $5,339 per kilowatt for a nuclear plant. Of course, natural gas is plentiful with fracking.

Green energy doesn’t work. It has a high cost per kilowatt. It’s unreliable. It’s unsustainable for the needs of the modern economy. Without the subsidies, these companies wouldn’t have started. The actual cost of the entire Obama energy boondoggle is far higher than the $10 billion in subsidies. The actual cost would have to take into account the higher costs of fossil fuels because of the emphasis on green energy. The final bill would also have to take into account the government costs of unemployment benefits for laid off workers, and the opportunity costs of no hiring of workers that worked in fossil fuel energy.

We might also add in the extra costs of issuing debt to pay for the poor choices of the central bureaucracy. Our grandchildren will have to pay that debt. Since most of the debt was issued in shorter term Treasuries, we might want to add in the costs of rolling the debt over periodically, and figure in the higher interest rate costs that surely will ensue in the future.

America cannot afford this kind of thinking, or this kind of policy. We need to end subsidies of all kinds. We ought to start with energy.

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