Direct federal giveaways to green energy companies has fallen somewhat out of favor, of late, Washington having proven every bit as inept at manipulating markets and picking winning technologies as Moscow was in the bad old days of the Soviets.
The most dangerous words in investing are, “this time it will be different.”
But never mind, where there’s a will, there’s a way:
The Navy said Thursday it will ramp up its use of public-private partnerships to purchase one gigawatt of renewable energy by 2020.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in a statement that one gigawatt is enough to power a city the size of Orlando, Fla. — or about 250,000 homes.
The purchase will be one means for the Navy to meet its goal that half of its energy comes from renewable sources by the end of fiscal 2020.
President Obama in his State of the Union address on Tuesday singled out the Navy for “one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history.”
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Tom Hicks, deputy assistant Navy secretary, said at a panel discussion in July that the service expects to have 100 megawatts of solar power, six megawatts of wind power and 270 megawatts of geothermal power by the end of 2012.
If these energy sources were more efficient than the petroleum-based sources they are to replace, Navy would already have been buying them. Essentially, DoN is taxing the Navy’s operating budget to instead procure more expensive sources of alternative energy as a smiley-faced federal subsidy program.
Fewer warships, delayed and reduced procurement of next generation strike fighters, limited pay raises for serving troops, and higher health care costs for retirees. Because we just can’t afford them.
But we’ll be green, damnit.
No matter what it costs.
When you’re a watermelon all this is a feature, not a bug..
Let’s all pray that those who see the utter stupidity of chasing a goal of ” energy unobtanium ” just because some community organizer wants it and at the cost of running down the world’s greatest military show up to vote this fool out of office. He & his ilk don’t care what it does to our defense and would rather piss billions down some rathole than do right by the troops.
10 months and 10 days until we can send Chicago’s Village Idiot packing and put an end to his stupidity…..along with telling his Lecturing Wife to STFU.
OMG….Obama Must Go !!!
Pure folly, exceeded in scale only by Germany. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/01/germanys-answer-to-our-ethanol-folly.php
When the sun does shine, how do you store twice your needs fow when it doesn’t shine?
Solar does work, in remote outposts, such as the Af, when the benefit outweighs your tanker convoys being blown up. And yes, you better use storage for night and cloudy days.
Lex, this isn’t a smiley-faced subsidy program. It’s an Obama Donor Payoff Program.
And if the Republicans had any backbone, they would call him on it.
Further proof of Obama’s desire to detroy our country and each and every element that makes us strong and great.
Atlas Shrugged come to life.
The thing that really torques my ratchet is that the Navy is already sitting on the world’s largest and best supply of clean energy. You want 1 GW of energy that’s as renewable as solar? Order the Stennis to a flank bell.
An administration of idiots.
Hear! Hear!
Just more proof, if needed.
One Big Assed Mistake America.
Now that’s Raaaaacist! You’re already on the list, though.
Nope, just inspired.
People always understate their goals when they talk about wind & solar. They’re not just buying 106 MW of wind & solar, they’re also buying 106 MW of other generation capacity for when the sun ain’t shining or the wind ain’t blowing. Probably natural gas, because they can spin up quickly. So they’re really buying 212 MW of capacity! Be proud of the fact that Navy’s buying two whole power plants to do the job of one!
Or look at it another way. Wind/solar typically ends up operating at about 25% of peak capacity. So really Navy is buying about 26MW of wind/solar, and about 80MW of natural gas. It’s so green!
Early quotas to adopt less efficient and more costly techniques for energy production when there is no emergency on the horizon, tends to prove at least one of three things, in my opinion.
Either lawyer-politicians can be fooled far too easily, they are really not very bright when it comes to principles of engineering and technology, or they have well surpassed crime syndicates in their racketeering influences and corruptive organizations practices — legally!
I would merely observe that a “green” warship is an oxymoron.
Carry on.
So is “renewable energy,” but nobody balks at that idea any more.
Shout the lie long enough, people simply stop attempting to correct it.
Lex,
I work in a “green” building. Just built. Brand new. And everyone hates it. To get the LEED Gold certification you have to do a bunch of stuff that makes working in the building a pain. Despite doubling the number of people on a given floor (as it was in the old digs) they halved the capacity of the restrooms. The paper towels in the restrooms are made out of some sort of material that seems to lose all structural integrity when it comes into contact with a wet hand. There is absolutely no sound absorbing material on any of the metal walls and the entire office has the acoustic qualities of a timpani. We are not allowed to plug anything in to the outlets that isn’t issued and the compliance stasi regularly sweep the building to ensure no contraband fans, etc. are about. The windows are coated with a highly reflective thermal coating which also renders them virtually impervious to all cell phone signals. Of course, all the lights are on motion sensors so you can be sitting at your desk typing away and your office will just go dark. These are just a few of the joys of being green…
Sounds like the perfect conditions to put in place at a new GITMO….just annoying enough to drive the inhabitants over the edge….all in the name of being ” green”…. historians will look back at this period of time and wonder what caused a sensible and purpose driven nation to follow a hapless incompetent down a path to mediocrity…..
God help us all.
Apparently your company is run by idiots, LEED, Greenstar, whatever, done right they’re really nice places to be.
It’s nothing more than back scratching of Obama’s biggest contributors. Nothing more. Another Green fantasy company went terminals up today and we’re out more money in “loans.” I fully expect more to fail and for us to be out more money. But how we would know how much money exactly, since there hasn’t been a budget in 1,000 days.
All green means is a modern-day hairshirt. Enviromentalists are the modern day flagellants, punishing themselves for their sins. Think driving a Prius and using all of that recycled junk is fun? I hate the new CF lightbulbs that our overreaching Imperial Federal government has mandated. Just imagine the fun cleaning up the mercury. How about using one piece of toilet paper? No thanks.
When I see organic or enviro-friendly at the store, my mind instantly says “Add 40 percent to the price and watch the guilt-ridden suckers come running.”
I drive a reasonably fuel efficient primary car and so does my wife and my kids. My second car, on the other hand, sucks gas like a teenager sucks Diet Coke and I really don’t care. It wouldn’t pass an emissions test in Senegal, much less the U.S. But I’m not driving it that much.
I try to recycle plastic garbage bags whenever possible. I reuse old printer paper as scratch paper.
But I don’t feel guilty using paper plates. Or styrofoam. I don’t feel guilty at all. Our air and water is far cleaner than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. Their belief it can be cleaner is a pipe dream. Like when you learn guitar, it takes 90 percent effort to learn 90 percent of what you need, but when you want that extra 10 percent, it takes the same 90 percent effort to just budge the meter. Same thing with enviromentalism. It made sense when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, but now, not so much.
For them, that’s not the real agenda. It’s no more than a simple assault on progress. It’s de-evolution. It’s Marxism wrapped in a shiny, green wrapper.
Here’s a semi-off-the-subject question: where did this green obsession of the past 10-15 years come from? I don’t remember all of this b.s. green propaganda during the 90s, when gas was a dollar a gallon.
There was a man, Iron Eyes Cody (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Eyes_Cody) who did the original don’t pollute commercial. I remember it from the 70′s. Environmentalism has been with us for quite a while, be it not tossing your trash out the window of your car or maintaining topsoil and planting cover crops or even setting a septic tank’s laterals at a certain depth.
Green is a whole different animal. It’s a religion of its own. You know how the Mormons in Utah had polygamy? That sort of makes sense when half your men have died making the trek. Contrast their be fruitful and multiply agenda with the modern Green movement. Greens would self-destruct in only one generation were it not for the fact none of them practice what they preach.
– Max
Watermelons, they are. Green on the outside, red on the inside, they are. Maybe if we talk like Yoda we can get through to some of them.
Keep in mind what the central concept of environmentalism is…
Ray Mabus has the distinction of being the worst Secretary of the Navy in our history. That is fitting since he works for the worst President.
Unfortunately, they are also responsible for doing great, and long lasting harm to our military. Bad decisions, and just plain dumb choices thay have made in the areas of policy, personnel and procurement will resonate for years to come.
God save the United States and success to Marines!
Solar powered submarines. As yes, I can see it now. Quiet, powerful, stealthy… the perfect combat vessel. Think I’ll write an article for “Proceedings”.
You can put in some screen doors for improved passive ventilation.
Thank goodness, though, we have the flags and SES’s in the Department of the Navy who are willing to call it for what it is, stand up and put their stars on the line.
/sarc off
What next? square rigged aircraft carriers..
Isn’t it wonderful to have leadership that can somehow envision and then embrace the Green Revolution while at the same time contine to support the woeful LCS program. We sure are lucky to have some many smart Flag Officers and GS-16 civilian staff.
It’s simply a way of funding the favorite green energy Dems by way of the Defense budget. Watch how quickly this dies under a Romney or Gingrich administration.
Mabus has his units a little confused. Watt is a unit of power. Joule is a unit of energy. 1 watt = 1 joule per second. The normal way, in the us, to express energy content in fuels is the BTU. I woulda thunk they taught his ignorant a$$ better than that at the boat school.
Yeah. Watt is a time rate. Joule is an amount of energy. He coulda said Watt-hours, as my electricity provider does. As long as you remember your dimensions, this kind of thing is not too demanding on the wits. E=IR, F=MA, and all that.
We should punish the guy by making him do all of his thermo calculations with degrees Rankine and slugs for mass units, and to be extra-cruel, versts for length and fortnights for time.
“He coulda said Watt-hours, as my electricity provider does.”
And even then, he’d have been wrong… because if he’s planning on buying 1Gw/h of ‘renewable’ energy, it stops after he’s used it up, doesn’t it?
I don’t know anything about Mabus’ background, but clearly “engineering” isn’t in there.
Well, we _did_ have a coupla paddle-wheel aircraft carriers. They burned the nasty old-fashioned fuel, though.
It’s intentional. And standard issue republicans won’t help. Tea Party – maybe. I’ll give them a chance, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to pick our candidate.
PS – Thorium – Molten Salt Reactors are the way to go.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/next-gen-nuke-designs-promise-safe-efficient-emissions-free-energy?page=1
CANDU natural-U heavy water reactors aren’t too bad, either. Though, I must admit, there is more thorium than there is uranium. I correspond with a guy on the ‘net who claims he wouldn’t mind having a fast breeder in his back yard, but he lives in Los Alamos and works at The Lab, so I reckon he’s a bit of an outlier that way.
Also, Freeman Dyson said the high-temperature gas-cooled reactors were the safest, like at Fort Saint Vrain. They were supposedly inherently stable and didn’t need external complicated controls.
They built these in the 60′s actually, and they worked great. My impression, which may be wrong, is that they didn’t provide any weapons grade fuel and so were not valued at the time. Here’s a longish vid on them though. It sure seems we could all have one in the back yard in a perfect world. Ana have one heck of a redundant power grid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bbyr7jZOllI#!
PS, I read today that China is supposedly going to go gangbusters on them.
As I wrote in a comment to an earlier post, this is making me feel that-
there deja vu all over again. I mind the morose grumpiness I saw in our armed forces back in the seventies. I do believe it’s coming again, and may be worse, this time.
I think of the other post, about the Panjandrums trying to scare the women and cops about the dangerous crazy skilled-at-arms veterans, and think, hmmm, is there anybody actually qualified for that Caesar gig?
I think it’s fair to say that every time this administration announces some sort of initiative that involves spending, it’s really just a way to pick the pockets of people who wouldn’t ever vote for Obama and “redistribute” it to someone who would.
This “green tech” scam is so obvious, though, I wonder how people can’t miss it. I’ve lost track of how many corporate boards Al Gore sits on, but a lot of them got federal subsidies, grants, and contracts. I’m sure it helped that the young lady he hired as CEO of his Green Group went on to become Obama’s assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. She was responsible for disbursing a great deal of cash, and she made sure her friends got taken care of. She also did her share of self-dealing while she was there. She left that job and joined George Soros’ new “cleantech” investment fund. I may look at putting some money in that fund, as I’m sure Cathy Zoi has the inside track on who the winners are going to be in this centrally directed, command and control economy we now have.
When Obama announces that the federal government is going to “lead by example” and start replacing the vehicles in the federal fleet with plug-in hybrids, what I hear is that Obama is going to keep the UAW’s coffers full by keeping all those dues-paying members fully employed building cars few people want to buy. The government is going to have to buy charging stations for those plug-in hybrids. Obama’s “jobs czar” happens to run a company that makes those, so he’ll see a nice payday, too.
The cronyism and serial gang rape of the taxpayer aside (I’d never pay money to see a Leonardo DiCaprio movie or buy something like a Chevy Volt, but thanks to the miracle of the car maker subsidy and the refundable tax credit I’m helping DiCaprio add a Fisker Karma to his car collection and I think he already got a Tesla out of me), the internal logic of the whole “green” movement is contradictory.
In Britain, they subsidized wind farms. The wind farms are an unreliable source of electricity. So power companies are contemplating building gas-fired power plants to duplicate the (advertised, not actual) generating capacity of the wind farms. But the government will have to subsidize those as the power companies won’t be using them consistently enough to break even.
And they’ll be producing more pollution than gas-fired plants that are actually in operation. If they’re shut down entirely they can’t quickly go on line if they are needed. So they’ll have to idle and in this state they aren’t very efficient and thus pollute more.
Twice the money for more pollution. I don’t get the concept. But apparently we’re going to go down this same road.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Q16GN8b2AzE/TBfDsbaV90I/AAAAAAAAB-o/6Ss8hU_ekKw/s1600/wind_turbines_bird_killers.jpg
Nothing says you care about saving the planet like wind farms.
Brian R….”eople always understate their goals when they talk about wind & solar. They’re not just buying 106 MW of wind & solar, they’re also buying 106 MW of other generation capacity for when the sun ain’t shining or the wind ain’t blowing.”
And if you sell power-generation equipment, like GE or Siemens, this is a feature not a bug…you get to sell the same capacity twice! Just like the real-estate agent in the mountains where the land was so steep he could see both sides of the same acre.
I believe it was in 2009 when I was still on active duty that I received notice of the proposed windmill to be built at NAS Pensacola. Out of the blue, as Air Space Chief, I was informed via e-mail that the proposed 400 (and some change!) foot tall windmill was already scheduled and a done deal. This huge mega-watt thing was to be placed just west of Sherman Cove. That would put it (for you that recall the field) right under the traffic pattern for Runway 7 Right at the point most trainers turned right base for the runway and began to descend after coming out of the overhead. After cheerfully informing us that this had somehow mysteriously been approved all the way up without ANY airfield input, wouldn’t we be happy to just re-approve it and save them some time? You know, in the interest of wind energy, Gaia, and Mom nature and such. I still have my reply saved somewhere. It caused some merriment and/or consternation (depending on one’s viewpoint) throughout the fleet. I of course voiced a heartfelt negative opinion based in part on 20 some years of ATC experience, with just a little bit of Chiefly angst and resentment thrown in. To date, they still haven’t built it, but with the condescending attitude in the e-mails, it wouldn’t surprise me to see it proposed again. Green energy being, you know, sacred and precious and stuff.
“And if you sell power-generation equipment, like GE or Siemens, this is a feature not a bug…you get to sell the same capacity twice!”
Obama will no doubt tout this as further evidence of his phenomenal abilities as a job creator. It would have been nice if Obama had decided to demonstrate those abilities by not killing the Keystone XL pipeline project.
Paying manufacturers twice may be good for GE and Siemens. I’m sure if Obama reads this blog he’ll probably tout all the jobs he’ll create at those companies. Given the nature of our global economy, not all of those jobs will be in the US. And the further costs of choosing this route include lost jobs in other sectors of the economy.
As I said earlier, I don’t see why we need to head down this road because it leads to disaster. Others have been down this same road. The thing is, Obama knows this, too. Recall if you will how often Obama used to point to countries in Europe and say we needed to be more like them and subsidize “green technologies” and build a wonderful new “green economy” filled with “millions” of wonderful “green jobs.” Like Spain. Or Denmark.
Somebody looked. Spanish economists looked at their own country’s experience, and the Danes commissioned a report on theirs.
Here’s the Spanish report: http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf
And the Danish report: http://www.cepos.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Arkiv/PDF/Wind_energy_-_the_case_of_Denmark.pdf
I won’t quote extensively from either report. They each contain gems. I especially enjoyed the titles of chapters and subsections in the Spanish report such as “Spain’s Self-inflicted Economic Wounds from “Green Jobs” Regimes.” And the Danish report concluded it’s discussion of what would have to happen in order to meet the government’s new arbitrary goals to increase their reliance on wind power as likely to force “the country into a venture that shows a high risk of turning into an economic black hole.” Each country had different approaches to “going green” and had slightly different results. But they both found “going green” leads to skyrocketing electricity rates, zero net employment increase (Spain lost jobs), out of control government spending, and that it actually lowers a country’s GDP by creating perverse financial incentives to shift employment from productive economic sectors to the unproductive “green” sectors.
The thing is, Obama knows this. When these reports came out, reporters asked the White House how Obama could continue to claim these countries were successful role models for how great our “green” future is going to be. The White House got a hold of the DoE to “pushback” against these reports and the people who wrote them. Not to sound too terribly conspiratorial, but the person at the DoE responsible for seeing to it that the White House got its talking points trashing these reports was Cathy Zoi, the one with the conflict of interest problems I mentioned earlier. She contacted George Soros’ think tank and the American Wind Energy Association and got her talking points. Essentially the talking points she handed up to the President that slammed these reports and denigrated the researchers were written by industry lobbyists and her then future but currently present employer at Silver Lake Kraftwerk, where I’m sure they’re making money hand over fist on all those “investments” she made while with the DoE.
One of the interesting aspects of this sordid process is that when those reports come out in their own countries, they were widely slammed as well. But nobody accused the researchers of getting their facts wrong. They agreed with all the conclusions these reports drew and that renewable energy has been a complete bust. They slammed these researchers for telling the truth too loudly, because the only hope Spanish solar companies and Danish windmill makers have for survival now that European countries are running out of subsidy money is for the US to take the same path to destruction as their countries. They can’t survive without subsidies, and they accused these researchers of being “unpatriotic” by being too public with the facts and possibly harming these companies chances to rip off the American consumer and taxpayer.
They needn’t have worried about the possibility this President was going to do his job and protect US interests. He enjoys ripping off Americans, bankrupting the country, and making sure we have no reliable sources of cheap, abundant energy. As well as insulting our intelligence by feeding us a pack of lies put together by lobbyists (who represent many of those foreign multi-nationals; they can join the AWEA, too) about how the Spanish and the Danes aren’t the experts on what the situation is in Spain and Denmark. He and his administration are the experts we ought to be listening to about Spain and Denmark (and Soros and the AWEA are part of his administration now).
This really is a scam, in all possible ways. Not only are all his cronies making money at our expense, we’re not going to see any permanent jobs out of it, and those temporary jobs that will go away as soon as the subsidies stop (unless, of course, instead of merely subsidizing the “green” energy sector he also taxes and regulates the fossil fuel energy sector to the point where “green” energy sources start to look competitive price-wise) reduce employment in other sectors and are a drag on the economy.
If he gets a second term, he’ll leave office in such a state of ruin that undoubtedly he’ll get another Nobel Peace Prize and this time he’ll get to keep the money.
The other big problem is that green energy is seldom available where you want to use it, which leads to follies like SoCal Edison’s current “Tehachapi wind project,” designed to generate wind energy in the high desert of use in… downtown Los Angeles. Something like 100 miles away.
Which has them in the process of running a 3-phase 500KV feed straight through the heart of Chino Hills, CA’s residential neighborhoods, on gigantic 120-foot towers.
Problem is, their right-of-way is only about 80 feet wide. Needless to say, there are some upset people living there.
Nice thing about power plants is, you can build them where you need them, rather than having to string wire across two counties.