Not everyone has been able to take advantage of the gobs of taxpayer money pouring between the seams to encourage the adoption of so-called green technologies. And it’s not because they aren’t truly green. Joe’s Build Back Better has beaten back business.
Inflation and demand have made surviving in this “environment” challenging.
Electric vehicle maker Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the second electric startup to do so in the last year as even industry leaders struggle to lure more buyers beyond the early adapters of the technology. …
“Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to operate efficiently,” the company said in a prepared statement late Monday. “After evaluating all options for our business, we determined that proceeding with a sale of our assets under Chapter 11 is the most viable path forward for the company.”
It’s too expensive, even with government-backstopped bailouts or incentives. The free money doesn’t make up for the devalued currency and the rising cost of doing business. And Fisker is based in California, where Gov Nuisance has promised an EV in every driveway by 2035 or some such thing with the caveat that you, thanks to rain taxes, might not be able to afford (or want) a driveway either.
The not-so-sunny economic picture has also claimed one of the nation’s largest solar installers.
Titan Solar, which installed thousands of systems across the U.S., informed its employees June 13 that it was “closing its doors,” having failed to secure a buyer for the company, according to an email obtained by TIME. In the email, Titan said that it had helped over 100,000 households go solar.
Titan is not the only solar installer to close up shop lately. The company, which could not be reached for comment for this story—its website has shut down—is one of 16 major solar outfits that have filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and 2024, according to Solar Insure, which offers warranties and monitoring for homeowners who have solar. They include Pink Energy and Vision Solar, which like other operators in the industry faced regulatory action and numerous consumer complaints. Customers are left with solar panels on their homes that they may or may not want. Some are working with lenders to find another company to take over the maintenance of their panels; others are just trying to get out of the loans.
Residential installs peaked as fly-by-night “startups” appeared magically to line up at another taxpayer-fed feeding trough. However, relying on government handouts to incentivize private market sales is not a sustainable future, especially in a high-inflation economy. Sure, you can find cheap solar panels from China made with slave labor and dirty coal, but it doesn’t help with all the other fixed costs.
Related: Night Cap: Solar Panels Are Getting Exponentially Less Green By Leaps and Bounds
The cost of doing business climbed like Joe, out of the basement and into the heart of DC police making. Thining margins and price pressures on customers erase any incentive benefits, and if you can’t afford to feed your family, a solar install is probably not even on your radar.
The wind isn’t faring much better, not from a lack of trying—and they are still trying, and why not? Sure, it blows electricity prices into the stratosphere, but Companies that embrace wind get a huge tax credit.
This is driving Offshore wind as misguided environs, opportunistic politicos, and energy companies align despite the threat to consumers’ pockets and whales. Politicians want the green street cred, and Energy companies want the green tax credits, and no one cares who else has to pay. The scam is literally the very thing the keep it in the ground folks mean when they claim Big Oil gets all sorts of taxpayer support as if that would end if we stopped using Fossil Fuels.
Dopes. Every incentive or inducement is a product of politicians giving in to lobbying as if that would stop or isn’t in play. It very much is with a difference. Big Oil could stay in business without it – and provide abundant on-demand electricity. Green tech can’t and won’t even with the inducements, and the price for ratepayers is an economy-killing drag on everything else.
All lies and promises – the wind industry has finally been rumbled in Germany and is about to be shown the door in Australia.
The wind industry and its parasites have been guilty of more than just a little hubris. Claiming to be able to deliver cheap, reliable sparks was always going to be their undoing. Gradually, Europeans are waking up to the unassailable fact that wind power is based on a technology that was redundant before it began.
No modern economy can run with electricity delivered at crazy, random intervals. To compensate for that meteorological fact, Germany is flat out building more coal fired power stations – not less. Around the globe the wind industry promises to displace “dirty” coal fired power and Germany is no exception. But the reality is very different: the facts have finally caught up with them – wind power will never replace fossil fuel generators and the cost of having capacity to back up wind power is astronomical.
German industry is bailing out and heading to the US – where power is a third of the cost that it is in Germany – and some 800,000 German homes have been disconnected from the grid – victims of what is euphemistically called “fuel poverty”. For Germans the attraction to wind power is fading fast – funny about that.
Less but still more than it should be.
We need to stop this progressive madness. The goal was to make electricity too expensive so we’d use less. What they seem to have forgotten is that making energy cost more makes EVERYTHING cost more. The combined rise in the cost of everything has an exponential impact on daily budgets and not just lifestyles but lives.
This deliberate assault has fueled inflation, already exacerbated by Democrat-Party-led DC policy.
