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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."
Abengoa Solar, a unit of the Seville, Spain-based engineering company, will receive a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to build a solar-power plant in Arizona that will create 1,600 construction jobs and 85 permanent jobs, according to White House documents released in conjunction with Obama’s address.
The power plant will be the first of its kind in the U.S. and generate enough energy to power 70,000 homes, Obama said.
1.45billion to power 70,000 homes.
That's $20,000 per home?
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
What is the total cost of install and operation for 50 years for the solar project? What is it for a nuclear plant? A coal fired plant? The solar power plant likely has a higher construction and installation cost, but it likely has a lower operating cost.
I don't know the answers to the questions I'm raising -- but I do think that simply asking "That's $20,000 per home?" isn't the question which yields the most useful answer.
P.S. It's a loan guarantee. $1.45B is the upper limit on how much it will cost the taxpayers. The lower limit is $0.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The defence budget for the current war is around 480 billion dollars per year, so it's the equivalent of two day's budget for the war to be spent on something that may eventually reduce the number of wars.
Money well spent, all drunken sailors should be so wise.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Yeah, because BP spending $27B for a one-time oil spill is money much better spent than $2B in a long term strategy which might prevent such future catastrophes... and even that pales in comparison to the loss of life and incredible expense of continued efforts to do whatever it is that the U.S. is doing deployed in oil-rich countries.
Don't blame the current administration. The previous administration takes a lot of blame, but going much further back there were errors all along the way which could be easily forseen. The truth is that there are a lot of people who simply don't give a F- as to what happens to the people who are going to be living with the results 20 years from now. The bad decisions which made people wealthy 20 years ago are being paid for by the people today. And the bad decisions of today won't be paid for another 20 years.
I swear that there are some people in this world who simply disagree with political policy because they didn't vote for it, and form their opinions about what affects their immediate well-being. Choosing not to see the problem doesn't make it go away, it just makes it all the harder to deal with for the generation which will inherit the problems 20 years from now.
If you think that $2B on solar is a waste, what do you think a better policy is for a sustainable future? Solar is not the answer... but it's part of the answer.
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
>> unless the the Sun turns off
I'm pretty sure this would be covered under a sunset clause in the loan documentation.
Folks are making points about the money spent, or loaned actually, but what is saved is just as valuable. Less $ on oil wars, oil cleanup, medical costs associated with pollution, retraining for lost jobs due to spills ruining livelihoods. And then there's the savings that are less about money but perhaps even more important. Like fewer fouled beaches, saved species, oh and that global climate change thing. The calculations for this kind of investment really need to be more wise and less driven by simpleminded ideology if you ask me.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
I'm always puzzled at this notion that if you allocate money to some project, and as a result that project hires somebody to do a job, then you've created a job. I suppose it is true if we compare what you've done to keeping that money in a mattress. 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. So it mostly doesn't matter how you allocate money: it's mostly always going to create jobs. The government is taking money from people through taxes, thereby preventing those people who originally held the money from putting that money somewhere where it could create jobs - like putting it in the bank, investing it or perhaps just buying sodas. So the government doesn't directly create jobs by allocating money to a project, since jobs would have been there anyway by not collecting that money through taxes in the first place.
Now the economy is not a zero sum game, so it may still sometimes be a good idea to have the government redistribute money to projects that will benefit the country or humankind in the long term, e.g. where those projects wouldn't obtain funding otherwise because the benefits of the project are external and won't be enjoyed directly by the person undertaking the project. Perhaps this project will do that, and perhaps in benefiting us all it will even indirectly create many more jobs than those that are directly necessary for carrying out the project. What I'm puzzled by is just the idea that the direct employees of the project represent "jobs created" when a similar number of jobs would likely exist anyway if the project never existed. I guess the most you can say is that jobs have been created in one state/town/place by removing a similar number of jobs from other states/towns/places, and that is a benefit to the place that is receiving those jobs. So a politician presenting such a project will want to focus on the benefit of jobs created in one place and downplay the harm of removing those jobs elsewhere.
Subsidizing non-economical power generation is not money well spent.
That argument will hold no water until the oil industry stops getting their subsidies.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Estimates vary widely, depending on who you ask and who is paying those people to give that answer. With nuclear it depends on if you count that you have to monitor the waste for 1 million years or if you just dump it in a hole and forget about it. Most people assume you can forget about it, or reprocess it later to recoup some of your costs.Here's one estimate:
The cheap price for coal and gas may or may not count the cost of dealing with they myriad environmental and health problems associated with them, such as acid rain, mercury contamination, coal miner occupational hazards (~120,000 coal miners have died on the job since 1850), global warming and associated climate change, water quality degradation due to mountaintop removal, wars in foreign countries to protect oil interests (Iraq, Niger delta), etc. etc. etc. Contrast that to solar power where the only point that real environmental degradation is being done is during the synthesis of the cells (and recycling at EOL) rather than over the entire lifespan as in coal.
The answer here seems to be that solar is more expensive up front, but should benefit society because of the lower environmental and health concerns associated with it. Note that this makes fiscal sense for the federal government to make these loans because more often than not, it is the taxpayer who pays for the clean up of environmental damage or health risks, not the power company.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Well, it's a good thing most of those terrorists were Saudis, and they produce lots of oil!
You can stand down, wingnut.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Actually, a drinking analogy is not a bad one for U.S. energy policy.
An alcoholic binge drinker realizes that the amount they are drinking is making a big, negative financial impact on their lives. They have always done home brewing to try to keep the costs of their habit down, but the yield keeps declining (parts of their basement are already a large brewery, and they're out of room to expand, worse, the production volume is declining year by year for some reason). So, they have to buy more and more alcohol from the store and they're inconveniently fond of imported beer. More than half the beer they drink is now imported (~60%), and they consume a stunning 20% of all the beer available for sale in their entire community. Realizing the situation, they promise to their family, year after year, that they will cut back on the alcohol and find other alternatives. They provide financial incentives to themselves to drink less alcohol and more of the other stuff. They invest in alternatives (e.g., they bought some milk and put it in the fridge). Yet, year after year, they drink a greater and greater volume of alcohol, and it costs them more and more to do so. This goes on for about 40 years. Worse, one day the brewery in the basement blows up, and the mess and insurance costs to clean up the basement were absolutely insane (actually, that's misleading -- the brewery still leaking into the basement as we speak and the full costs aren't entirely quantified yet, but the basement is indeed a mess).
One day, the alcoholic decides to drink a small glass of water from the tap in addition to the 20 gallons of beer they expect to drink that day. It was difficult, but they feel confident they are on the road to kicking their habit.
Now replace the alcohol with oil and that pretty much sums up U.S. energy policy of the last 40 years or so.
To return to your analogy, the problem is: that brick *IS* all that's ever been invested in building your house compared to the scale of the challenge of constructing it.
Party on, USA!
Solar PV and thermal *is* fusion power. It works today, and can only get better with more adoption and economies of scale. The original solar PV panels cost over ten grand apiece and weren't near as efficient as we have today! Now it is a few hundred, and they are better.
Solar PV is good for joe homeowner, solar thermal is good for making larger commercial generating plants. We have millions and millions of rooftops sitting baking in the hot sun that could be covered with panels, and millions of acres of desert that could have mirrors and towers.
You want fusion, let the engineers start building it,(I suggest 100% tax credits for actual deployment as opposed to a carbon tax to jumpstart cleaner power adoption better) the scientists can keep playing around with laser magnetic plasma bubbles at their leisure. If you want the power though, today, all we lack is building the stuff and getting it out there.
And no threats of war over who gets access to solar power, as opposed to oil or fission or man made fusion power. No embargoes, no acrimonious debate, no inspectors needed, nothing. It's the most peaceful energy source we have that actually works now, and it scales from running one small house to a whole city. This is stuff we have *now* that could be used a lot more.
Not sure if you can slap a dollar sign amount on what "peaceful" is worth, but you sure can see the external costs and threats with other sources of energy like oil and fission and coal and so on, along with the not barely hidden environmental costs. Fission power is the largest threat we have to global war today, because nations threaten each other with the weapons. If you can make fission power, it is a short step away from fission weapons, as such, too dang dangerous if you ask me. I don't care if a fission reactor can make a lot of "hot", because it is in the headlines daily that we could go to a larger war over who has access or "permission" to develop the tech.
This doesn't exist at all with solar fusion power. There should be a global trillion dollar massive push for solar, just to help eliminate the threats of war over fission power level tech. This is no joke, we are *this close* to a much larger major middle eastern war over fission tech, and that in turn WILL impact oil prices once it starts, and it looks worse and worse daily.
If we had gone heavily solar thirty years ago, on a massive scale, just done it, we could have nipped this in the bud, and helped avoid it.
All our forms of energy have costs, money, waste, etc, but eliminating wars and threats of wars, *those* costs in terms of money and human misery, should never be overlooked in the larger and more long range picture.
... because China is going to invade us with which navy, exactly?
If we spent twice as much as they do on the military, then yes, I might agree with your sentiment - we shouldn't cut spending, because maybe they might invade, who knows, but really that would be bad for business all around so they might not and anyway they don't really have the capacity to move that many people.
However, our military spending isn't just twice as much as China's - we spend TWENTY times as much as China. We could cut our military spending to one-tenth of what it currently is, and we'd still be spending more than any other country.
In effect, you ignored my entire post. I did not shrug off the economics of it. I pointed out that it was starting to approach nuclear power in terms of operating cost. I figured that was enough by itself, but apparently not, so here's a quick review of economics 101 for you:
1. The cheapest solar installations are currently about on par with the most expensive nuclear power plants. This means the "non-economical" thing is just a load of bull, as I said in the post you replied to.
2. What's the #1 thing that brings down the cost of manufacturing? Economies of scale. Now you can't get economies of scale on nuclear plants. Each one has to be designed specifically for the location, at least to some degree. No two are alike. This doesn't lend itself to getting cheaper any time soon. Even if we started building cookie-cutter nuke plants, we'd still only be able to put them in certain places, which means economies of scale never kick in. And the fissionable material is only going to get more expensive as demand increases, so the long-term future of nuclear is not so bright.
Does solar lend itself to economies of scale? You bet. As we build more PV panels, we continue to find ways to make them for less money. We've seen major advances in non-PV solar systems, too, particularly in the area of nighttime power storage. What one thing is required for solar power to get cheaper? Lots and lots of people building large-scale solar power systems. Unlike nuclear plants, we can build tens of thousands of these things safely, so economies of scale can actually kick in and make the cost of each installation substantially cheaper. Subsidizing a few solar installations now is a great way of making new installations much more economical in the near future.
Besides, solar power is already cheap enough that it costs barely half what I'm paying for my highest tier of power from PG&E, so it's plenty economical already. The people who say solar is not economical are either misinformed or have an agenda. If it were not economical, PG&E would not be in the process of setting up a number of substantial solar power systems right now. In fact, at California's energy rates, even individual-sized PV systems (some of the most expensive per kWh) typically break even on cost after 5-10 years and are guaranteed to still be providing 85% of their original power output after 30. Sounds pretty economical to me.
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