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Obama Awards Nearly $2 Billion For Solar Power
crimeandpunishment writes "President Obama says it's time to heat up solar power, and he's willing to spend a big chunk of federal money to do it. Saturday the president announced the government is giving nearly $2 billion to companies that are building new solar plants in Arizona, Colorado, and Indiana. The president says this will create thousands of jobs and increase our use of renewable energy."
These are loans, not give away money. I am fine with that. Obama's 1'st years and W' 8 years did trillions of give away dollars all based on deficits. This is the feds lending the money at a low rate. The 2 billion loan will probably cost us around 100 million long-term. In fact, the smartest thing that Obama/congress can do is to lend the money to state and local entities to build out projects. Had they done that originally, then we would have a pretty low debt down the road (though with the potential to have much higher).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1.45 billion is a LOAN. If the Spanish company takes the money and runs, the feds are on the hook for it. If they take the money and default after they complete the project, the feds are on the hook for the money, but we get the project. If they don't default, the feds are on the hook for $0.
The 1.45 billion is not part of the budget, it is not being paid by tax payers at this point, it is a loan from a bank (not the feds) that the feds are insuring.
Increased power consumption is a fact of life in the US today. You can either invest in Nuclear (assuming you could get it okayed) for $3-5 billion; a coal solar park for $1.45 billion; or a coal plant for about $1 billion even. In any case, the feds are going to have their ass on the line for the project, and IMO, increasing the risk by 450 million is well worth it for not having to deal with the ramifications of yet more coal plants.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If they make it and produce electricity, then they will have to repay this loan over the years. So, unless the company screws up very badly or unless the the Sun turns off, in the end this will cost tax payers exactly $0.
How exactly does subsidizing solar power prevent Muslims from crashing airliners into skyscrapers
But more importantly, subsidizing solar power research means people can import less energy. Reduced global demand for petroleum reduces the market power and therefore political power of countries that harbor Islamist crusaders like the ones who committed a mass murder-suicide in New York on 2001-09-11.
One of the riskiest classes of loan guarantee made by the feds is for nuclear power plant construction.
Those loans are expected to have a 50% default rate.
Solar's a bit less risky than that -- far less likely to have cost overruns or construction problems. Generally the government does not price risk high enough, but that doesn't mean they lose every dollar they guarantee. Most of it gets payed back.
Someone had to do it.
yes, and at an interest rate of 3% (lets just assume that, we have a low risk loan here) that's $50 per month and home. That's still a large number, but if you add the other positive effects like job creation and technology build-up this not a "drunken sailor" invest. Just as a remainder: Iraq and Guantanamo for example, these are drunken sailor activities.
He's actually not spending any money. The companies building solar power are taking loans for $2B and probably expect to make a profit.
These plants will not use panels at all, so this seems off point. They will use mirrors to focus the radiation onto pipes of flowing molten salts that then transfer the heat to turbines or to storage. Solar panels are improving steadaly and need investment so as to continue to improve as all technology that gets the R&D improves in theis day and age, ...in leaps and bounds...but they have nothing at all to do with the power plants being built. And mirrors are pretty well done technology, although the corrosion factor has been an issue I believe because of all the salt perhaps.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
(--Rupert Darwall, "Britain Tries Fiscal Austerity", the Wall Street Journal, 29 Jun 2010)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The IRS figure includes more than just fuel costs. It's the number used to estimate the cost of driving for deductions. It's intended to cover the other costs associated with travel, such as maintenance, insurance and depreciation. Admittedly, it's not perfect, but it does give a reasonable estimate for taxation purposes.
I'm sure the GP is referring to the Spanish Job Study, which has been debunked by everyone who has read it. This article is particularly good at pointing out the massive methodological flaws in the study.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/credit_for_trying_spanish_stud.html
The terrorists did quite a bit of their training, particularly the training in how to operate an airplane, in an oil producing nation with a history of invading other other producing nations; that same nation's government also gave specialized training to the people who organized the 9/11 attacks, including Osama Bin Laden himself! Why did we not invade that country?
Oh, wait, that nation was the USA.
Palm trees and 8
And the ideologies of Bin Laden are a reaction to the US military presence in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere (like Afghanistan).
So if you're trying to make a point that the war in Afghanistan is not intrinsically liked to oil, you aren't doing a good job.
What is the time frame of use on these estimates (20 years, 50 years)? I've never seen a PV estimate as low as that (or any of the other technologies for that matter).
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
If that was sarcasm and I missed it, I apologize. Either way, the truth is that cost savings do not roll downhill. Any tax savings realized by corporations goes to officer salaries.
Even if management is ethical, they still won't create jobs; without an increase in consumer demand, the ethical thing to do is distribute the savings as dividends.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
First of all, Premiums Are Not Subsidies. The spanish government doesn't pay a single penny for renewable energy (it doesn't even concedes loans to companys, like Obama is doing). The money for renewable energy isn't paid from taxpayer's money, so cutting premiums can't return back even a single Euro to the government. So it has not sense to claim that premiums are being cutted because of public debt issues because renewable premiums aren't paid with public debt, they are paid by the companies that distribute (but don't generate) the power, and they are quite low (2c€/KWh).
Second, our anual government budget for this year is 350000€ millions. The premiums cut has been of 1300€ millions. That's a 0.003%. The total amount of premiums paid in 2009 to renewable energy before the cut was (according to the Industry minister) 6000€ millions. That's a 0.017% of our 2010 public budget. Hardly a problem even if was paid with public money (which it wasn't)
Your percentages are off by a factor of 100, should be 0.3% and 1.7%, but that still doesn't affect your argument much as those percentages are still rather low.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
Not much comes from Afghanistan?
In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan
http://www.unodc.org/pdf/research/AFG07_ExSum_web.pdf
Half the imported US oil comes from an OPEC nation
The top five source countries of U.S. petroleum imports are Canada (19%), Saudi Arabia (12%), Mexico (11%), Venezuela (9%), and Nigeria(85)
43% of the oil in the US comes from the US.
Where your oil comes from is more of a regional thing - west coast, some from Mexico, alot from Alaska and California, some from the Great Basin and Great Plains
http://www.eia.doe.gov/ask/crudeoil_faqs.asp
However, if you put it in a bank then the bank is going to invest the money which will move that money into the hands of someone who is doing something with it. That "doing something" is likely going to entail hiring someone at some point.
In 2010 the bank is going to loan it right back to the Treasury, since institutions currently perceive private investments to be too risky. Aren't you aware that we're experiencing terrifically low rates of private investment and a historically low rate of return on US government debt? People are calling it a "flight to safety".
Similarly, consumers aren't spending as much, they're saving more. Which means more money being put in the bank which then ultimately invests that cash in US treasuries, since the return on private loans sucks --- after all, consumers aren't spending. You can choose to do something about this dynamic or you can choose not to, but you should at least realize what's going on.
Your advice would have been timely in the early 1990s and maybe even in the early 2000s. It's completely useless right now.
Auto sales were already rising. Cash for Clunkers spiked above that rise, then "spiked" below that rise, and then it caught up to the rise. In other words, the only thing CFC did was add a spike up and a dip down in a more or less steady rise, while costing the taxpayer money.
Arizona - Solar thermal generating plant.
Colorado - Solar panel manufacturing plant.
Indiana - Solar panel manufacturing plant.
I think it's obvious who "came into this with their mind made up."
People that actually bother to analyze things, other than noting the CfC was not purely an environmental program, but also economic stimulus, are more rational, and note the program had both benefits and disadvantages:
Take a look herefor example:
First, an important point, it's not all about CO2:
"Of course, cleaner-running cars also spew fewer air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds, benzene, formaldehyde, particulate matter, and other toxic materials that contribute to smog and respiratory disease."
And here is where we get some interesting numbers...
"According to a study by Christopher Knittel of the Center for the Study of Energy Markets, that would reduce annual gas consumption in the United States by roughly 186 million gallons per year, lowering emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important element in the greenhouse gases that are implicated in global warming, by about 1.9 million tons a year."
"Another criticism of the plan is that cash for clunkers is an expensive way to reduce carbon emissions. One estimate, by Henry Jacoby, co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT, is that CARS will reduce carbon emissions at a cost of about $160 a ton; Knittel puts the figure at $237 and possibly much more. By comparison, a ton of carbon on the European trading system goes for about $20 right now.
"But while the direct environmental effect might be expensive and not necessarily huge, is it at least a meaningful step in the right direction? To answer that, one has to look at a more complicated picture. First of all, there is the environmental cost of manufacturing all those new cars; the process of making and transporting the average new car creates 6.7 tons of carbon dioxide. So that’s about 4.6 million tons of carbon dioxide created right there from the trading in of 690,000 cars."
If we went by that without considering side-factors, then CfC would eventually result in a net CO2 reduction.
However, they even take into account your point:
"What’s more, there is the “Mexico effect.” As Matthew Kahn, an environmental economist at UCLA, notes, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement has, in effect, been a hemispheric cash-for-clunker program, as the United States and Canada ship used but sellable cars south of the border. If these are sent to the scrap heap instead, that means that many older and dirtier Mexican clunkers will stay on the road longer, reducing the gains of the slightly greener U.S. fleet."
But in the end:
"Moreover, most of the the funds for cash for clunkers came by shifting money from the loan guarantee program for renewable energy, which is designed to make it easier to invest in and expand green energy projects. Unfortunately, there is no alternate universe in which to test whether there would have been more green for the buck had the money stayed where it was. But the point is that to determine the calculus of environmental impact, one has to go beyond the simple arithmetic of new cars and mileage standards. The most that can be said of cash for clunkers is that it probably has some modest environmental benefits, and that these will accrue over time — but at above-market cost." ...which, as programs that are primarily designed as economic stimulus, not environmental programs, go, is a pretty good side-benefit. History will show CfC to have been an effective program. I may wish that it was tweaked, but I am capable of recognizing that it did, indeed, work.
Also, it never hurts to ask snopes.
Someone had to do it.
Thirty year lifespan and it won't pay back cost of production? Where did you get that? Why do people keep repeating this? This has been debunked here on slashdot numerous times now in these discussions.
Here ya go, you offered no citation for your 30 year claim, but I have a counter with citation. Various types of PV panels and energy to build them payback period, goes from one for thin film bleeding edge to four years for more expensive crystalline types, after that, all the power they make is free. OK, double that for some place with crappy sun, 8 years, that leaves 22 years of free or real dang cheap power.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
The big energy companies really don't like solar all that much, because eventually your home power plant is paid off and no need to send them a check every month. They'll fool around with it, good for PR purposes, but they really don't push it that hard either.
As to government subsidies and whatnot, meh, I can't think of a single form of energy production that hasn't been subsidized one way or the other from government. Heck, centralized power absolutely depends on government subsidy in perpetuity, eminent domain seizure and use with no check cutting to the property owners for power poles and natgas lines. If they had to negotiate transit fees property owner by property owner, coal and nuke power and natgas would be as expensive a way to make power as you can think of. And there wouldn't be nuke one if the government didn't back them up as the insurer of last resort, not a private insurer out there would cover all the liability risks and costs. Now look at making sure foreign oil keeps flowing with our military presence for decades...
Any subsidies or tax breaks for solar are the proverbial drop in the bucket, compared to what the other energy sources have benefited and profited from over the generations now.