Where Treehugger doesn't add the 1 + 1 - Granite Grok

Where Treehugger doesn’t add the 1 + 1

cost-of-solar-power-graph-1980-2012(H/T: Treehugger) As most readers know, I used to go over Treehugger a lot and bring back “stuff” as a Doodling – rather easy when they have a big slant for Progressivism, Urbanism, and UberEnvironmentalism all wrapped up into a single package.  However, since they’ve been purging of the likes of ‘Grok commenters Cris P Bacon and C. Dog, it’s been rather barren over there (and they got sold, so there’s a “bit” of a different focus there).  However, I did venture over and saw the graph – they’re all going ga-ga over this as they all seemingly hate any kind of energy source, it seems, that has anything to do with it coming from beneath dirt or water levels.  “Soon!” they believe, “we’ll be free of hurting Mommy GAIA with our noxious need of hydrocarbons”.

They’re believing that all of this taxpayer funding of solar and alternative energy start-ups has been the primary driver of the lessening cost to PV panels.  Well, in a way they are correct, but from my layman’s eyes, probably not the way they think.  I’ve seen this play before, and I think this has more to do with it than not:

SoloPower plant closing, mere months after opening

SoloPower, we hardly new ye.

Mere months after the maker of cutting-edge solar panels opened a manufacturing plant here in Portland, Ore., backed at all levels of government, it is suspending operations. The Oregonian newspaper broke the news on Monday after catching wind of a plant-closing notice that SoloPower had delivered to the state workforce development agency.

And ran thru $35 million of taxpayer monies (at least it was Oregon’s money and not Feds).  However, we know that the Feds have blown through Billions (remember Solyndra?) in trying to “manage” the growth of Green Energy here in the US (and, for all intents and purposes, done a wicked pissah job of dropping the eggs on it too).  My take on this?  Typical bubble – this time, not by angel and VC investors but by folks who seemingly hadn’t a blue clue about doing this (and even the VC pros strike it rich 1 out of 10 investments).  I think this phrase from the author really goes a long way to explaining the above graph:

with the gap growing as PV prices continued to fall in response to market oversupply.

Hey, why NOT take a risk when Uncle Sam flashes the bankroll? And with so MANY Elected Officials and Officially dubbed Smart People all saying “Green Energy” (instead of “Plastic”), did anyone really think that we were NOT going to get a huge bubble of “no cost” firms competing against each other?  And given all these fish in a very small pool, they did what every other similar situation in history has shown us – they try to “eat” the competition by doing the commercial equivalent of Outwit, Outplay, and……Out-last them all.  And when you’re all playing out of the same Uncle Sam’s pocket, one of the main ways to do so is to undercut the prices of the competition over and over (er, see above).  A bubble always means good things for consumers, no doubt, in the short term, as that chart shows.  My take is that  it won’t last for long.  Long term, however?

Unknown – if all of the firms have beaten themselves to pieces, there might not be much left of the “last peg man” standing.  Or that it might become clear that the going price just isn’t sufficient to actually sustain a mass market as what has been projected (hard to do when cost out is less than the income in).

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