Look at all those green jobs Obama promised!

Greetings all, Angry Webmaster here. I was just reading about the latest Obama backed green jobs success story. This one was about Solyndra in Fremont California.

This company was the recipient of $535 million dollars in stolen taxpayer stimulus funds and was the darling of the Obama administration. Today, this Great Obama success story, employer of 1100 people worldwide celebrated its success by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Umm say what? They went bankrupt? How did that happen? I thought all these green jobs would turn the economy around and we would all be rich?

Yeah, err, no.

In point of fact none of these so called green manufactures has amounted to a hill of beans. In Massachusetts, there was Evergreen Solar. This company was a big recipient of taxpayer dollars. Governor Steve Urkel Deval Patrick was a big booster and funneled $58 million dollars into the now failed company. (Due Diligence. I applied for a position with Evergreen a few weeks before it went belly up)

Both company’s manufactured solar panels. The problem with this is China can make them far cheaper than we can in the United States. The other problem is that solar cells and panels aren’t that efficient. At best, they are 25% efficient and usually less than that. Also, they don’t work to well in the dark.

The other big green energy system is the windmill, or as they are more commonly known, giant bird Cuisinarts.

There is a whole host of issues with these things. To begin with, they cost more to make then they ever earn back. The maintenance on them is astronomical and the failures tend to be rather catastrophic.

They also have a habit turning our avian friends into ground round.¹

The largest manufacturer of windmills in the United States is General Electric. In case you didn’t know, GE’s CEO, Jeffery Immelt², is one of Obama’s biggest boosters. In fact, Immelt and GE are so far in the tank for Obama that he needs to decompress for a week when he comes up for air.³ There is no doubt that if GE wasn’t getting taxpayer subsidies for their windmill operation, they would shut it down overnight.⁴

Now, there is one “green” project that does interest me. It’s called the Solar Tower⁵. The concept is rather interesting and there is one small test platform that’s been running in Spain for almost 30 years. It’s been generating 50Kw fairly steadily, only shutting down for maintenance and upgrades.⁶ China has built one⁷ and one is about to begin construction in Arizona.⁸ Whether or not these plants will be cost effective remains to be seen. They do have the advantage of having all their moving parts at ground level and are easy to maintain.

Right now most of the solar tower projects do have government subsidies, but if they do prove both economical and profitable I can see those subsidies ending. Right now, this is a new technology and we don’t have a baseline for it. We do have baselines for all the other green projects, and they average out to a big fat ZERO! I expect all these lefty trendy projects will lose their federal dollars in the next few years.

With the failure of Solyndra, yet another Obama boondoggle bites the dust. Pity it cost us $500 million.

~The Angry Webmaster~

(+3 rating, 3 votes)

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***UPDATE***

Someone in the comments section remarked that 25% efficient is pretty good and brought up the Internal Combustion engine. I commented back that he didn’t take into account the density of the various energy sources. I’m including a link to a .pdf file that should help explain this.

1. Windmills are killing our birds [↩]
2. Jeffery R. Immelt bio [↩]
3. The GE-Obama affair [↩]
4. GE-Obama Corporate Windmill Welfare Exposed [↩]
5. Solar Tower [↩]
6. Spanish prototype solar tower [↩]
7. Jinshawan Updraft Tower [↩]
8. EnviroMission Solar Tower [↩]