#ncga: Hager slaps at solar goons (But what about Marco?)
The majority leader of the North Carolina House has taken to Facebook to poke at the crowd — inside and outside of his party — who want government and private industry working together to fund and promote solar energy:
Mike Hager·
The picture below is a page from a solar farm application, located in Rutherford County.Please read the sentence in yellow “cannot be considered dependable capacity”.Doesn’t that just sum up the whole solar industry.
We agree with him on solar subsidies here at Haymaker HQ, but are wondering HOW this squares with his endorsement of Marco Rubio for President. Rubio announced recently that he is all in on the idea of private-public partnerships on solar energy.
Marco Rubio has been quite progressive on Cap and Trade, and was for it even before it became part of President Obama’s green agenda. In the Spring 2008 Florida legislative session, State House Speaker Marco Rubio pushed through a bill directing the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to develop a Cap and Trade plan for Florida.
Marco Rubio loves Polar Bears, and did not seem to care about Florida citizens electric rates. He recognizes that saving the Polar Bears is much more important than affordable electric rates for the peons.
Hager seems to care more about those unimportant taxpayers and electric ratepayers than he does Polar Bears, so it is unusual that he would have endorsed a progressive like Rubio. Rubio also supports some of President Obama’s other policies like a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
When relying completely on finite resources such as fossil fuels you can’t have “dependable capacity” for very long.
The Peak Oil theory turned out to be hogwash.
As long as solar and wind are intermittent, they will always be unreliable. Until there is a practical and affordable way to store electricity, intermittent sources only burden the overall electric system. This bug has to be dealt with before we even think about much deployment of wind and solar.
Nuclear is a good option, and we have many, many years of domestic coal reserves.
We also need the Keystone Pipeline to have oil resources from a friendly country, Canada.
Cronyism is a thing. Those “conservatives” who embrace it are lining up behind Rubio and Trump and HATE Rand Paul.
“As long as solar and wind are intermittent, they will always be unreliable”
BINGO, John Steed! Solar and wind work just fine, as long as the sun keeps shining, and the wind keeps blowing!
“But what about cloudy and windless days, Radagast?”
As William Shakespeare once said: “Aye, there’s the rub!”
And thus, we are led to believe by these Enviro-Wackos that “wind & solar” can meet all of America’s energy needs!
All we need do is move into a tent, walk or bike to work, become vegetarians (and smoke a couple more joints)!
I am not anti-solar or anti-wind, I’m anti-subsidies. However, neither solar or wind is reliable. 7 years ago, one of the US’s largest wind capacity areas (in Texas) lost their wind instantaneously and it almost caused a black out save for some fancy grid work routing by alert operators. And as stated above, solar is only good when the sun is shining.
As far as capacity, both wind and solar take up an enormous amount of real-estate already and they produce less than 6% of the total production. Think of how much land they would cover to equal the capacity of existing coal, nuclear and natural gas facilities.
Right you are, Richard. Government has no business giving any taxpayer funding to any business concern through subsidies or incentives. Solar farms are wasting many acres of good farm land because solar companies can pay many times more to lease that land than a farmer can. So giving them taxpayer funding to out bid farmers for such leases simply cannot be justified.