Solar Power Is Booming — Why Do We Want To Kill It?

TaeKwonDood writes with a followup to the news we discussed over the weekend about tariffs being places on Chinese solar panels. He writes, "According to Forbes, 'Solar power is booming. Imports from China were a tepid $21 million in 2005, but in 2011 installations totaled nearly $2.7 billion. That's a huge win. And just as advocates for solar power had hoped, a larger market drove down prices. Solar energy cost has declined by two-thirds in the last four years, meaning it will soon start to close in on fossil fuels.' There's just one problem: now the government wants to kill it. The article continues, 'As the market was flooded by both silicon (from silicon producers) and thin-film panels (by Chinese manufacturers), the price for thin-film panels came crashing down – along with Solyndra’s business model. ... Yet that isn’t the only instance of mismanagement. The whole clean energy program remains flawed, even at the consumer level. The people who are the most likely to be impacted by high energy prices, the poor, are the least likely to benefit from the solar rebate scheme because they lack the capital to pay for the installation.'"

Comments

Simple

[roman_mir]

The US gov't believes it can run the economy for some reason.

There is all this nonsense talk about how oil industry is getting 'subsidies', while in reality those so called 'subsidies' are just deductions in tax payments that the oil companies make, all while the real subsidies is money that the gov't wastes giving uninsured loans or just straight money to all these 'alternative energy' companies, that in reality would have never gotten anywhere based on the real market, all this, while the Chinese companies found all the necessary efficiencies to produce lots and lots of those solar panels very cheaply, and now there are all these tariffs by the US gov't on the Chinese solar panel products.

Who do you think gets hurt in all of this? Well, it's obvious - who is really gaining when the Chinese are importing cheap solar panels into USA in exchange for US dollars? If you can answer this second question, then you can answer the first one.

By the way, Obama believes he is a great genius of a businessman, why is he not using his own money to sponsor all these 'alternative energy' companies but insists on spending other people's money on this?