Some people are saying the Solyndra scandal is President Obama’s Watergate. Maybe so, maybe not. A lot of people certainly have a lot of “splainin'” to do about half a billion dollars of taxpayer money going down the drain. President Obama himself needs to justify his administration’s efforts to prop up an industry (solar energy) that the nation seems to be apathetic about, while it makes it more difficult for conventional energy companies to produce and deliver their vital commodities.
The IDEA of solar energy is very attractive. Energy directly from the sun is free and clean, we are told. Of course that’s not quite true. Outfitting your home to run on entirely on solar energy is actually quite expensive and would require the life of a 30-year mortgage to earn back the cost compared to most monthly electric bills. And then it would be time to replace the system. And there is necessarily some pollution involved in producing the panels and batteries that are part of any solar system. Perhaps that’s why Solyndra’s solar panels weren’t exactly flying off the shelves.
More than half our electric power comes from coal-fired electric plants. Actually when you think about it, coal is solar energy, too. Nature just stored the energy for us until we learned how to release it. By the same token, oil, plant-based ethanol and even wood are storage systems — Nature’s batteries — for solar energy. When we burn them we are releasing that stored solar energy.
Of course, ultimately we know that ALL energy is solar energy. If you believe that the earth and her sister planets were spun off the sun in the Big Bang, then even geo-thermal energy is solar energy, even though it’s boiler is deep in the earth “where the sun don’t shine”.
The only exception might be hydro-power. But then again, the sun causes evaporation, then rain, the rain flows downhill, man builds a turbine and produces electric power. Yep, hydro power is solar power too.
So, it’s all solar, and it’s all good. Efforts to make clean, direct solar power more practical and affordable should go forward. When solar is actually cheaper and easier than conventional fossil and plant fuels, then it will become dominant, but Solyndra is exhibit A for the folly of government trying to force something on the marketplace. Market change has to happen organically.
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