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Fox News: US Solar Energy Investment Less Than Germany Because US Has Less Sun
Andy Prough writes "Apparently those wise folks at Fox have figured out America's reluctance to invest as much money in solar energy as Germany — the Germans simply have more sun! Well, as Will Oremus from Slate points out, according to the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Solar Resource map comparison of the U.S. and Germany, nothing could be further from the truth — Germany receives as much sunlight as the least lit U.S. state — Alaska."
Fox News
It's the very first time Fox has said anything that's factually incorrect.
They mentioned briefly that the US tried to subsidize solar but the Chinese kept undercutting our manufacturers and we just couldn't beat their prices. What is Germany doing differently that allows them to beat Chinese prices? Tariffs? Import restrictions? Why does that kind of market manipulation work for Germany and why do we allow subsidies to happen in the states but not that sort of competition restriction?
... which still doesn't answer how their solar products compete with the Chinese. I like how they named dropped 'natgas' several times because the US has so much of it! No problems worth mentioning about natural gas!
Oh, right, they have more sun
My work here is dung.
I am envious of the deep suntans that most Germans flaunt in my face.
Their followers, however...will be outraged that the USA has less of something (anything!) than some other country.
No sig today...
Sun comes up. Sun goes down. You can't explain that.
I am not a crackpot.
Germany has advanced its clean energy capacity because it has maintained a clear and consistent policy of incentivizing it for over a decade. It is paying off. Last year they set a record by generating half of weekend electricity demand with solar. Denmark has managed something similar with wind power, getting 24% of its electricity that way.
Of course, Germany and Denmark have strong green constituencies who support those policies, but there are realpolitik concerns at work too. A few years back Russia shut down the natural gas pipeline that ran through the Ukraine to Germany and central Europe because they wanted to play politics with the Ukrainians. Natural gas prices spiked in Europe overnight and put a serious crimp in its economy. The Germans, Danes, and many others got the wake up call and have been driving toward energy independence hard.
There are longer term benefits for those economies who move their energy base off fossil fuels: predictable energy costs. In economic terms, when you increase the predictability and stability of key inputs businesses can better plan and grow, in the same way that low inflation means businesses can better know what their borrowing costs and real revenues will be.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Guess you didn't watch the video on the site then???
2:50+ into the video you get the offending statements
Here I made it easy for you:
http://youtu.be/jJN0B2RIIMI?t=2m50s
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Not to nitpick, but no one said "US getting less sun than US". I feel a bit queasy when people substitute the word "Germany" for "US".
Fox is part of a class of media outlets that tells its audience what it believes it wants to hear. That's it. It's not about fact checking or anything like that, it's about knowing that its audience would actually stop watching it if it changed direction and concentrated more on telling them what Fox believes is true, rather than what the audience thinks is true.
On that note, someone is bound to mention MSNBC, but MSNBC isn't really watched by anyone. MSNBC's mistake, FWIW, is that it's trying to do the same thing as Fox but for a different audience, but doesn't realize that liberals, by and large, don't "want to hear" things they "agree with" if they can't be backed up with facts (plus I don't believe NBC actually has any idea what a diverse bunch liberals actually are in practice.)
I'm embarassed to say that I've worked for at least one media outlet (not going to say which, thankfully most Slashdotters have probably never heard of it) that tries to do the same thing though publishing a variety of different magazines. The "liberal" products did badly, the "tea party" products did well. I leave it to the reader to determine why.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
According to a recent study by LBNL the soft cost associated with installing the panels are more than three times as high in the US compared to Germany.
http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/german-us-pv-price-ppt.pdf
Page 26: Costs that are not module costs. 4.46$/W in the US compared to 1.18$/W in Germany.
Higher cost results in lower volume.
Maybe they could spin it the other way saying that the US receive more darkness than any other country in the world! Take that, you German tree-hugging faggots!
As an experiment, I just went to the Huffington Post to see if I could find any bad science on a site that leans towards the left. One headline reads "Scientists Say ETs May Be Much Closer To Us Than We Ever Before Thought". Going to the article shows that the only reference to life was added by the editors and half of it makes no sense (ET phoning home is closer than people think? Really? How close do people think it is? And I thought ET phoned a nearby ship, not his home planet, anyway) and even the article itself is woefully inaccurate; the comments themselves point out that "at a habitable distance and size" doesn't mean Earth-like, especially since planets orbiting close to red dwarfs would be tidally locked. (The astronomer used the phrase "potentially Earth-like", which is a nice way of saying "only a few of them are going to be Earth-like".)
This was the first scientifically-related article I found on the first left-wing site I picked. It may not be as dramatic an error as saying that the US has less sun than Germany, but I wonder how big a mistake I would have found had I tried for a month or two or however long it took to find the Fox News error.
The media and political commentators are horrible at science. Nothing to do with Fox News specifically, as the Slashdot headline and the absence of articles about other sites tend to imply.
This is not meant to nickpick
I know "US getting less sun than US" means "US getting less sunlight than US", but I still feel a little bit queasy when people substitute the word "Sun" for "Sunlight"
Maybe that's just me ...
So, when people use the phrase, "fun in the sun", do you correct them with, "fun in the warmth and light of the Sun"? Do you tell people, "No, you are not getting some sun. You are receiving some sunlight!"
If only you had been around to prevent the Beatles from making fools of themselves by singing, "Here Comes the Sun", instead of, "Here Comes More Direct Sunlight".
Or maybe you are just a little too caught up in misplaced pedantry to notice the usage of the word "sun" has a common and accepted usage to denote the light or warmth of the sun.
Merriam-Webster.com: sun"
I love how this seems to work. One company failed (Solyndra). And it was allowed to fail, not propped up endlessly (which I think is how this stuff should work). The poster was all for using government subsidy to jump start a newish industry. But now that ONE company failed, it magically gets extended to all of them, and it's government fraud, and we should stop everything.
One company fails = "As for direct investment into "Green" companies the government shouldn't be trusted on that ever again."
A few points: