Intel solar spinoff announces NY plant closing

The News Tribune ^ | 12/22/10 | ap

[Nachum]

WICCOPEE — In a stunning reversal, the frequently lauded and taxpayer-funded SpectraWatt Inc. has told the state it will close its solar cell plant starting in March and lay off 117 workers.

The announcement was startling because in the past two months, the company, which had been promised about $8 million in tax dollars, planned to train more workers and changed its work shifts to enable a 24-hour operation.

In a news release, the company said it hopes to reverse the situation that led to the decision, but SpectraWatt officials did not respond to requests for details.

[nascarnation]

I read in the WSJ today that Boone Pickens has $2 billion in GE windmills he can’t use in the US because cheap nat gas produced by fracking has dramatically undercut wind as a souce of low carbon electricity.

Apparently ole Boonie is trying to sell them to Canada where they are required by govt edict.

[Spaulding]

Solar electric will become competitive after the left has succeeded in regulating out coal, nuclear, oil, natural gas, and hydro power. The tax subsidies necessary to sustain it until then come from a dwindling private sector. The partners of the Marxists are currently Ahmadenijad, Chavez, and their circle. The Chinese and Russians will be around to pick the carcass. Ahmadenijad will have little use for spoiled bureaucrats, and have a barbecue with the many gays and lesbians.

This has been Holdren’s plan since his E.F. Shumacher days, and preceded him with his mentor, Paul Ehrlich, whose idiotic zero population growth theories have been big sellers for years, in spite of the failure of virtually all of his dire predictions.

This is what happens when the acolytes are poly sci majors who don't understand science or engineering. The lawyers make money either way, until there is no more. The media make their living by sounding authoritative and towing the line that pays them. Solar flux density is simply too low to provide sufficient high quality energy to be competitive with the concentrated energy in atoms, hydrocarbon fuels, or, where it is practical, stored gravitational energy/hydro-power.

The smart guys, and Holdren, while he has never done any real science, is smart, are using the ignorance of the proletariat to destroy our economy so they can take control. Holdren wrote for Ramparts rather than do any experiments at Berkeley. He was part of a Marxist cell. It was no secret. Like most bourgeois Marxists, he lives very well, in luxury on Cape Cod dispensing Marxist science policy, paid from endowment money made by a conservative, the deceased husband of Theresa Heinz (Kerry).

The left is another version of Madoff's operation. They know its a ponzy scheme and know nothing they fund will generate positive cash flow or produce anything. It is their claimed goal to impoverish the workers while they control the justice department and military. It is this writer's opinion that Marxism is a convenient explaination for why they people have never produced anything themselves. That none of them produces anything is the true uniting princile of Marxism. It is the arrogance of the idle rich. Look at Obama's vacation-filled life, punctuated by brief appearances with his teleprompter.

It isn't necessary to know the details of the solar electric venture. Physics says they can't compete. Solar can compete with law grade energy for heating swimming pools in warm climates, or boosting the temperature of water for bathing or cooking. It isn't necessary to argue the engineering numbers, but they are not hard come by. Economics obviates the need to look carefully at the numbers. If it made economic sense, and where it does, solar applications survive.

Intel would carry the burden of laying off employees, unemployment and health insurance, handling private investor's legal challenges, disposing of properties, and probably, paying off the agencies who got them tax subsidies and grants. These subsidies will die with the Tea Party-driven House. They would have died in two years when Obama disappears (hopefully into prison for election fraud, having sworn he was a natural born citizen). Two years of negative cash flow makes no sense for Intel, whose business will grow outside the U.S. as the U.S. economy sinks.

New York and California have lots of similarities. California has its idiotic “Tesla” boondoggle just icing on the cake, and just rushed a bill to fund a dozen or so solar thermal electric projects, all of which will shortly be memorials to the Utopian disaster which was the Obama administration. Thank goodness the red states will pull the plug on the allowance which has allowed the crooks in Sacramento to pile on more and more dept as they direct payoffs to their political cronies. It is appropriate that “Moonbeam” will be in office when it fails completely. Intel did the right thing. With Tea Parties rather than RINOs and Democrats running The House there will be no more giant slush funds for a while. Solar electric and wind are both about payoffs - polemical props of the Marxists.