This industry, solar and alternatives, should have already been well established, along with all the offshoot businesses it would need, we were installing the early working proto-types models back some forty years ago, like the many other industries this country was envied for developing and quickly innovating the products of through a dedicated hard working work force that contributed to the innovations and growth. The U.S. should have already been leading in this again like we were in many other area's. Then the hammer came down back some thirty years ago as we even started shipping our trades to the countries that had once envied us. Many of those others, as this should have been, were helped to grow through partnerships of public and private, we still subsidize many as their wealth grows from lack of clear competition, until now, as those with our once trades start rapidly developing the new generations of alternatives and the products needed!
May 06, 2012 - When the solar manufacturer Solyndra went bankrupt, the critics had a field day with the Obama administration because of its $500 million loan guarantee to the company. It wasn't just evidence of favoritism and corruption that the likes of Republican Rep. Darrell Issa went after. It was the whole idea of subsidies to clean-and-green energy in and of themselves.
Much of the criticism was hoary ideological claptrap: the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers; there ought to be a level playing field among all energy sources; solar can never supply more than a teensy fraction of our energy needs; the renewables industry has gotten subsidies no other industry received. Ad nauseam.
Thirty-two years ago, when I still worked at the Solar Law Reporter, a publication of the Solar Energy Research Institute, a division of the newly minted Department of Energy, it was pretty much the same line of claptrap. On the technological side, solar, it was said, and wind-generated electricity and geothermal power and the other renewables, amounted to an ultra-expensive scam that would never be able to supply more than a minuscule fraction of the electricity needed to power the country.
Subsidies and, say, spending federal money for people like us to provide source material for laws friendly to solar (and wind, etc.) were a rip-off of the taxpayers it was said. Didn't matter whether these were as big as requiring utilities to buy power from renewable sources or as mundane as writing model laws for municipalities to govern whether a neighbor can plant trees that block a residence's solar panels. All nonsense said the naysayers. The engineering, it was claimed, would never be able to achieve what other sources could achieve. A happy fantasy at best. Just another Treasury drainer at worst, money that should go not to DOE but DOD.
But as long as Jimmy Carter was in office, the money flowed in our direction. The chief rationale behind this was one we still hear talked about: energy independence, or as it was more commonly known then, oil independence. The first and then the second oil shock, the Iranian revolution against the U.S. puppet-shah, the Soviet move into Afghanistan, the partial-meltdown at Three Mile Island all made freeing the U.S. from Middle Eastern petroleum imports a popular slogan. read more>>>
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