Strangely enough the sun that regularly rises in the East and sets in the West is not as dependable a partner in the "clean energy" business as your average tax dollar. Savvy promoters of "renewables" can almost always find another government bureaucrat to milk for money, yet the sun isn’t so dependable.
At night the sun can’t be found at all, on cloudy days the light is reduced and in winter the rays are reduced for months.
This short-term unreliability is why "clean energy" companies put such a priority on cleaning out the taxpayers. Aquion Energy is the latest solar subsidy farm to go bankrupt. Fox News describes the late Aquion as "a cutting edge battery maker" that only managed to trim taxpayers.
Just seven years after Aquion cashed a stimulus check for $5.2 million; the company has closed its doors. At that federal taxpayers got off easy. In Pennsylvania they really took it on the chin. The first grant was awarded so Aquion could build a plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. After only two years, Aquion was able to land a total of $16.6 million from the state after it promised to create 341 new jobs.
At the time of Aquion’s closing only 50 jobs had been created at a cost of $332,000 in tax proceeds per job.
Now you may say there is no way of predicting which new companies will be successful and which won’t, and that’s true. And that’s also why the government shouldn’t be in the position of picking winners and losers in business. As William Yeatman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, explains, "Who thinks the Department of Energy has the expertise to predict which companies will succeed for fail in the marketplace, particularly in an industry that is not only dependent upon government subsidies, but is highly unpredictable?"
Besides the country already has an excellent mechanism for picking winners and losers in the marketplace. It’s called the free market and it uses competition to determine which companies succeed and which fail. Even better the market doesn’t cost a dime in tax dollars.
Aquion Energy evidently could spin a good story — it was named "the North American Company of the Year Award" at the annual Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, which "focuses on emerging trends, leading innovation companies, and key players in sustainable innovation" — but it couldn’t produce results.
Once the market determined that, private money went elsewhere and there weren’t enough government grants to keep it afloat.
"Clean energy" and "green energy" are a product of "global warming" hysteria that feeds on government money, or as Yeatman explained, "Let’s remember that the need for energy storage systems is strictly a consequence of the intermittency of renewable energy sources like solar and wind. These companies benefit from the grants and indirectly from the inefficiencies of an industry that exists by the grace of political favoritism."
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker’s bureau. Read more reports from Michael Reagan — Go Here Now.