Free Republic

The Department of Energy reached a settlement Thursday to recover $200 million in taxpayer funds from a loan the Obama administration distributed in 2011 to finance a $1 billion solar power plant that was deemed obsolete before it could officially go online. The settlement between DOE and Tonopah Solar Energy must now be approved by a bankruptcy court, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported. The DOE provided a $737 million loan to Tonopah in September 2011 for the purposes of financing the $1.1 billion Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Nevada. The agency disbursed funds for the plant in 2011 and...

A $1 billion solar plant approved in 2011 never delivered what it promised and closed last year. Solar farms are the new frontier in energy, with falling costs and myriad benefits. A combination of terrible management and simple technological advancement turned the plant into a dinosaur. ======================================================================= Bloomberg reports that a planned $1 billion solar plant was out of date and obsolete before it could even be completed. The Crescent Dunes plant opened outside of Las Vegas in 2015, when its technology was already behind, and the solar boom since then has completely eclipsed it. Now, the closed and...

Government planning and subsidies will make America the world’s green-energy superpower, create millions of jobs, and supercharge the economy—or so we’re told. The reality is closer to Crescent Dunes, a Nevada solar-energy plant that has gone bust after receiving a $737 million federal loan guarantee. An inconvenient truth is that the sun sets each day, but the Obama Administration’s green planners had an app for that. They decided to invest in the Crescent Dunes facility that would use molten salt to store heat from the sun, produce steam, and generate electricity even at night. The utility NV Energy had already...

The purveyors of solar energy are working overtime to spin the now official failure of the Crescent Dunes thermal solar plant in central Nevada. The contracts to purchase the electricity from the constantly broken plant will be voided. Bloomberg Businessweek claims that Crescent Dunes was obsoleted by technological advances in the form of photovoltaic based solar plants. That is nonsense and misses the whole point of the Crescent Dunes project. It also misses the reality that all utility-scale solar is a failure — not marginal, not growing into being practical, but a total and complete failure. The scalable forms of...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here. Another article, ungated: This $1 billion solar plant was obsolete before it ever went online. The article says taxpayers are liable for $737 million in loan guarantees. The waste in a Green New Deal could be in the trillions.

OPINION | IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE FUTURE WE CERTAINLY MUST UNDERSTAND THE PAST. THIS IS TRUE AT LEAST WHEN IT COMES TO WHAT WE CAN EXPECT FROM CORRUPT POLITICIANS. To envision the size of the pot of gold that Democrats envision for themselves at the other end of the Green New Deal rainbow we only have to look back to the Obama administration, the $3 Trillion in “stimulus” money, the Green Movement, and how it seemingly enriched Democrats, their donors, and Nancy Pelosi in particular. For background we cite a September 2011 article from the Daily Mail: Even as...