Tag: solar power

The Hidden Subsidy for Renewable Energy

Renewable energy really means anti-establishment energy, or politically correct energy.  The energy is usually electricity that is distributed via the electric grid.  The source of energy has to be “natural.”

Solar and wind are the most popular types of renewable energy.  Hydroelectric energy derived from a big dam on a river might seem ideal, except that the promoters of renewable energy don’t like dams.  If you can figure out how to generate hydroelectricity without a dam, you can call it renewable.  Nuclear energy might seem like a good candidate except that nuclear energy is too scary and too good a fundraising tool to accept as renewable.

Solar energy costs about seven times as much as electricity from coal or natural gas.  Most of the cost is hidden in subsidies.  If that truth were not obscured by massive propaganda, hardly anyone would build solar energy or wind energy farms.

The renewable energy promoters are politically successful.  About half the U.S. states have renewable portfolio laws that mandate the amount of renewable electricity they use.  For example, California requires that 60% of its electricity be renewable by 2030.  That has increased and will increase the cost of electricity in California.  Many electric customers pay more than 50 cents per kilowatt-hour.

According to the promoters of renewable energy, it is well-suited for solving a multitude of imaginary problems.  The number-one imaginary problem is global warming, rechristened “climate change” when the globe failed to warm.

The Sierra Club is a leading promoter of renewable energy.  This is the pitch on one of their websites promoting renewable energy:

We are facing monumental threats to our planet’s future. We are fighting back with every tool at our disposal — but to face these challenges, we need your support. Make your gift today.

Even the New York Times has become critical of the Sierra Club, for reasons described in this video.

Solar and wind are erratically intermittent sources of electricity.  Solar quits at night and whenever a cloud obscures the sun.  Wind quits when the wind slows or stops.

When solar or wind electricity is introduced, it is supplementary to the existing electric infrastructure.  Solar or wind cannot replace existing generating plants because solar and wind  are intermittent sources of electricity.  The existing grid generating plants must be retained so they can supply electricity when solar or wind fails.  In order to compare the cost of solar and wind with the traditional fossil fuels, we need only to compare expenditure when the traditional plants are powering the grid with the expenditure when solar or wind is engaged.

When solar or wind is working backup, coal and gas plants are idling.  Every megawatt-hour of electricity not produced by a coal or gas plant reduces the cost of fuel by about $20.  Every megawatt-hour of electricity produced by a solar plant costs about $150, mostly amortization of the original cost of the plant.  The cost for wind is similar.  A spreadsheet showing a detailed calculation of the cost of solar energy can be downloaded here.

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Young farmer’s crusade to protect vanishing farmland pits her against solar developers in New York

Renewable energy developers say local opposition is one of the biggest impediments to building wind and solar projects in the U.S. Besides the impact of large-scale industrial projects littering the view of the countryside, opponents are also concerned about the impact on their land values and the destruction of precious limited farmland. 

In 2023, Alexandra Fusalo bought 6.74 acres of land near Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, and she set out to create a pollinator farm. That’s a type of farm that produces a productive habitat for pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, with diverse native plants, water sources and nesting areas. She documents her farming efforts in her “House of Green” Substack. 

“My goal this year was to see how many rare, endangered and common pollinators I could attract,” Fusalo told Just the News. She said she counted a couple dozen monarch butterflies on her land on one day in September. 

Her involvement with solar opposition began one day when she was working in her garden and a neighbor told her that he’s often approached by solar developers looking to buy his land. “It kind of sent shivers down my spine. All these pollinators I’ve attracted to my farm, what would happen to them? What would happen to my investment?” she said. 

Vanishing farmland: 24 million acres fewer than we had 2017

The neighbor assured her that he wasn’t going to sell his land to solar developers, but Fasulo said the developers are aggressive and many farmers do end up selling. Between 2017 and 2024, the U.S. saw a decline of 24 million acres of farmland, a trend that worries Fasulo.

The average age of farmers is rising, and few young people aren’t pursuing careers in agriculture, making it attractive to sell off unused farmland to developers. 

Farmland is being sold for other types of development than renewable energy. But renewable energy takes up large amounts of land, and unlike other types of energy, rural land is an attractive location to site wind and solar projects. 

Fusalo said on various social media platforms that young farmers will become rarer if farmland continues disappearing. To help protect farmland, she established the nonprofit American Land Rescue Fund, which pays for “environmental attorneys who take on industrial and governmental projects that threaten rural communities, ecological integrity, and agricultural sustainability.”

She posted a video about what her neighbor had told her, and soon after that, she went to Schuylerville, a small village near her farm, to speak to the Saratoga Town Board about a law placing more restrictions on solar development.  

At this meeting, a representative of Cypress Creek Renewables came out from Santa Monica, California, to argue that the law was “excessively restrictive,” according to the minutes of the meeting. 

“We’re in the boonies up here. It’s freezing. There’s more trees than humans. It’s not New York City. So I was sitting there thinking, ‘why is there a person from California in our little town board meeting?’” Fasulo said. 

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Europe’s Solar Surge Exposes Cracks In Aging Power Grid: Analysts

Europe’s solar power boom is putting huge pressure on electricity grids that were never built to handle this much renewable energy, say analysts.

As a record number of new solar panels are being installed every year, the old grid system is struggling to keep up.

Solar generation capacity in the European Union continues to increase and reached an estimated 338 GW by 2024, according to SolarPower Europe.

To curb its dependence on Russian energy and accelerate its green transition, the EU set a goal in 2022 to install at least 700 gigawatts of solar power by 2030, enough to supply electricity to hundreds of millions of homes.

But the rapid expansion has exposed cracks in Europe’s energy system, threatening to slow the transition unless grids catch up.

Europe’s power grids faced a surge in voltage problems last year, with 8,645 over-voltage incidents reported in 2024—nearly 10 times more than in 2023, according to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E).

Aging distribution infrastructure complicates the issue. Industry group Eurelectric estimates that nearly half of Europe’s distribution networks will be more than 40 years old by 2030.

Energy analyst and project lead at the Helmholtz Center Berlin, Susanne Nies, told The Epoch Times that Europe’s power system is under heavy strain because it was designed for a time when electricity made up only a small share of total energy use.

“When you go to the countryside and countries like France or even Germany, those grids have been built in the 50s. They are really nearly 70 years old,” she said.

Europe’s electricity system was initially designed for one-way flows—from large power plants to homes and businesses, Nies explained, adding that now it must handle power flowing in both directions, as millions of solar panels feed energy back into the grid.

She said today’s grid needs to combine large regional “super grids” with smaller, local systems that can operate independently during emergencies.

Harry Wilkinson, head of policy at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the challenge is not only that Europe’s grid is aging but that it must be vastly expanded to connect power sources that are far more scattered than in the past.

“Just the physical amount of additional cabling that you have to add to the grid, to connect, that is a big challenge, just in itself,” he said.

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Wind, Solar Projects Can Stick Taxpayers With The Tab Coming And Going

When it comes to our energy future, it is often true that what many on the left consider an enlightened long-term view is in fact short-sightedness that fails to reflect the full consequences of their actions.  

Such is the case with the liberal media’s fawning over the Republican governor of Wyoming for his embrace of “alternatives,” including a glowing profile last year on CBS’ “60 Minutes” for his advocacy for wind turbines. “Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon pursues green, carbon-negative agenda in one of the nation’s reddest states,” trumpeted the online version of the piece. 

Many Wyoming residents are not on board, including from his own party. The state GOP passed a “no confidence” vote on Gordon in 2023 after his climate-related remarks at Harvard University. And a New York Times story (written in 2021, updated in 2023) on Wyoming’s energy landscape noted that many residents have frequent complaints about turbines taking over hunting land, lights polluting the night sky and energy transmitted out of state. The controversy has dragged on into 2025.  

For Gordon and others, “Wyoming is very windy” seems to be the simplified justification for erecting unsightly wind turbines across the landscape. But what makes a Republican official’s championing of wind or solar concerning is not so much his belief in the (dubious) effectiveness of the energy source as appearing to brush aside the actual cost to taxpayers.  

How many wind and solar farms have sprung up across the U.S.? Estimates show nearly 1,400 utility-scale wind farms and more than 6,700 solar farms. Those farms consist of more than 70,000 individual wind turbines and more than 200 million solar panels, (according to AI calculations based on available information on estimated capacity data and individual panel wattages).  

It’s important to understand the vast array of individual wind and solar components because someday, starting in the not-too-distant future, they will individually wear out. What happens then? 

According to government estimates, many turbines are already nearing end-life status, meaning they will either need “repowered” or decommissioned. “The time to disassemble, demolish, and remove wind turbine components and wind energy project-related infrastructure and conduct restoration activities can be 6–24 months, depending on the size of the turbines and the number of turbines involved in the project,” according to government guidelines.  

For solar installations, the issue is even more pressing. “By 2030, the United States will need to manage around one million tons of solar panel waste,” according to a recycling industry estimate. “This number is expected to grow to 10 million tons by 2050, making the U.S. the second-largest producer of solar panel waste globally. Currently, only about 10% of decommissioned panels are properly recycled, despite containing valuable materials like silver, silicon, and aluminum.” 

Proponents of “alternatives” insist that the costs for decommissioning wind and solar installations are typically assumed by companies through agreements negotiated at the time of construction. That’s small comfort considering that more than 100 solar companies have gone bankrupt in recent years, including residential, community solar projects and utility-scale installations. The year 2024 “saw an uptick in bankruptcy filings in each of these three sub-categories,” according to one industry tracker. 

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The Sun Is Setting on Solar Scamming As A Real End to 47 Years of Taxpayer Subsidies Is Finally on the Horizon

“Solar construction firm Blue Ridge Power issues mass worker layoff in North Carolina,” read the article in pv magazine. “The utility-scale solar engineering, procurement and construction firm filed a WARN act with the state, cutting over 500 jobs.”

Much of the rooftop solar industry is in liquidation mode, and now the central station “utility scale” solar industry is in trouble. Expect more of the same in the next months as solar subsidies and local opposition (the environmental grassroots) grows. The delayed end of the Investment Tax Credit (30 percent credit) and the Production Tax Credit (2.8 cents/kWh) will cause a rush to the exits before the credits expire at the end of 2027 (with credits at risk for projects not started by July 4, 2026).

Blue Ridge is a primary industrial solar installer in South and North Carolina, with 8,000 MW installed and 1,200 MW under construction in 14 states. Some quotations from Ryan Kennedy‘s September 23, 2025, recap:

“Blue Ridge Power has experienced market headwinds similar to those impacting the entire renewable energy industry, requiring Pine Gate Renewables to dedicate significant resources to support the organization. After reviewing numerous options to find a path forward, Pine Gate made the difficult decision to conduct an orderly wind-down of Blue Ridge Power,” said Pine Gate Renewables in a statement.

And on the macro situation:

E2 research shows that since January 2025, businesses cancelled more than $22 billion of planned clean energy factories and projects that were expected to create 16,500 jobs. Analysis by Energy Innovation suggests that more than 830,000 jobs could be lost due to policy rollbacks created by the Trump Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The U.S. clean energy workforce now stands at 3.56 million. In 2024, 7% of all new jobs in the United States were in clean energy, and clean energy represented 82% of all new energy sector jobs. However, approximately 50,000 fewer jobs were created in 2024 as compared to 2023.

“What these numbers show is that this was one of the hottest and most promising job sectors in the country at the end of 2024,” said Bob Keefe, E2’s executive director. “Now, clean energy job growth is at serious risk – and with it, our overall economy.”

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Pakistan Proves Green Energy Is Not The Answer: Inside Their Solar Powered Water Crisis

Green energy solutions were supposed to rescue Pakistan’s farms. Instead, it’s supercharged pumping, emptied wells, and pushed the country’s most populous province towards a critical water emergency. So, while we continue to hear that our environment is at risk from man-made climate change, how can we ignore the irreparable damage being done to the very same environment green energy is supposed to save? 

What’s Happening in Pakistan?

Farmers in Punjab – a region home to 128 million people – have rushed to replace diesel systems with solar-powered tube wells. But, while it’s now cheaper and more “environmentally friendly” to power irrigation, it’s turbo-charged a water shortage in the province. Irrigation runs longer and more often and cropping patterns are shifting towards thirstier staples, while groundwater levels in key districts continue to fall. With the increased opportunity generated by cheap “green” energy, new wells are appearing across villages, boreholes dig deeper, and water tables are on their way to extinction. 

Punjab is the hardest hit region, but all around the country, most rural homes draw from groundwater. While the resources are being drained by solar panels though, it becomes more expensive and more difficult for families to access dwindling water supply, and salinity creeps up in the soils. So, while switching from diesel to solar power will sound like a victory on paper to most, its rushed adoption is affecting millions of people’s access to water. 

A Warning to the World

This is not a small problem. Punjab is one of the largest subnational populations on the planet, and on its own would be the 11th most populous country in the world. This current green-powered crisis is a case study in how blindly encouraging renewable energy sources in the name of hitting targets can affect entire countries.  

While countries are increasingly pushing farmers to use solar power, they should be learning from Pakistan who jumped on green energy sources before implementing any kind of policy on its usage. And it’s only taken a few years.  

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$2.2 billion solar plant in California turned off after years of wasted money: ‘Never lived up to its promises’

Seen from the sky, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert resembles a futuristic dream.

Viewed from the bottom line, however, Ivanpah is anything but.

The solar power plant, which features three 459-foot towers and thousands of computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats, cost some $2.2 billion to build.

Construction began in 2010 and was completed in 2014. Now it’s set to close in 2026 after failing to efficiently generate solar energy.

In 2011, the US Department of Energy under President Barack Obama issued $1.6 billion in three federal loan guarantees for the project and the secretary of energy, Ernest Moniz, hailed it as “an example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy.”

But ultimately, it’s been more emblematic of profligate government spending and unwise bets on poorly conceived, quickly outdated technologies.

“Ivanpah stands as a testament to the waste and inefficiency of government subsidized energy schemes,”Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, an American energy advocacy group, told Fox News via statement this past February. It “never lived up to its promises, producing less electricity than expected, while relying on natural gas to stay operational.”

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The Developing World’s Alleged Solar Boom: Survival Amid Government Dysfunction, Not a Model for the Rest of Us

Mainstream media and green agenda advocates celebrate the spread of solar in developing countries as proof that fossil fuels can and should be abandoned, presenting it as both an environmental necessity and a path to prosperity. British officials urge investment in a “solar revolution across Africa,” citing projects that combine solar with mobile technology, while the World Economic Forum praises Pakistan’s “solar boom” as a lesson for others.

The reality is less glamorous. Roughly 1.3 billion people worldwide lack access to grid electricity. In countries where corrupt or dysfunctional governments cannot deliver reliable power, people turn to solar out of necessity, not climate concern. Off-grid solar is a survival tool, not a lifestyle choice.

What most households can afford is minimal: a small panel that, after charging all day, might power a single light bulb for a few hours at night or charge a phone. These systems cannot handle laptops, refrigerators, washing machines, or other appliances that define modern life in the West. They also fail with larger energy demands such as machinery, agricultural equipment, or water pumps, necessary machines for survival in these regions. As a result, people still rely on generators and fossil fuels to operate this type of machinery.

At night, a house may have only one bulb lit, giving off very limited light. As a result, families still rely on flashlights, candles, or kerosene lanterns to move around, forcing them to buy flashlights and batteries, lanterns and fuel, or else purchase additional solar panels just to recharge their flashlights during the day.

The so-called solar boom is not a green revolution. It is a desperate response to government failure, a stopgap solution that provides the bare minimum rather than a path to prosperity.

On paper, the solar numbers in the developing world look impressive. Developing countries now account for more than half of global solar capacity, compared with less than 10 percent a decade ago. In 2017, they even surpassed industrialized nations in renewable energy production, largely due to solar.

Across Africa, more than 1.5 million households now rely on solar home systems, a nearly 300 percent increase since 2015, supported by mobile-money financing. Kenya leads in installations per capita, with some 30,000 small panels sold annually. Bangladesh has rolled out over 5.2 million systems, bringing electricity to nearly 12 percent of its 160 million people. India added a record 9,255 megawatts of solar capacity in 2017, with another 9,600 megawatts under development.

While these numbers may look impressive, scaling solar to sustain modern living standards would be unimaginably expensive, requiring vast resources, land, and infrastructure. Worse, such a build-out could cause more environmental damage than the continued, use of fossil fuels.

The power requirements of modern appliances far exceed what small off-grid systems can deliver: hair dryers need 1,200–1,800 watts, central air conditioners 3,000–3,500 watts per hour, and one ton of cooling capacity requires about 1,200 watts of solar panels. To run a central AC unit efficiently would take around 3 kilowatts of output, roughly thirty 100-watt panels. Meanwhile, the average American home consumed 10,791 kWh of electricity in 2022, demanding about 25–30 panels per house.

In dense suburban neighborhoods, there simply isn’t enough roof space, while ground installations would consume vast tracts of land. Building solar farms on this scale would devastate the environment, casting shadows that kill crops and vegetation, requiring tree removal, and converting natural habitats into industrial solar sites.

Cities in northern latitudes or regions with heavy cloud cover would still face major energy shortfalls. On top of this, manufacturing, installing, maintaining, and replacing billions of panels would create more pollution than fossil-fuel generation ever did.

As an example of scalability, consider the land and infrastructure required. To power New York City with solar would take a system of about 40 gigawatts, covering roughly 200,000 acres, or 312 square miles, an area equal to five Districts of Columbia or 50,000 Walmart stores.

Other estimates put the requirement at 420 square kilometers (103,800 acres) just to meet the city’s 10.5 gigawatt demand. At the national level, powering the entire United States would require between 13.6 million and 22,000 square miles of solar farms, about half the size of Pennsylvania, or the size of Lake Michigan.

But solar panels alone are not enough. A zero-carbon grid with 94 percent renewables by 2050 would require 930 gigawatts of energy storage and 6 terawatt-hours of battery capacity. For context, the average U.S. household uses about 30 kWh per day, while a Tesla Powerwall stores only 14 kWh. Scaling battery storage to national demand would exceed current global production by orders of magnitude.

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The AI Data Center Wars Have Begun… Farms, Water and Electricity is Stripped from Humans to Power the Machines

The farms that once produced food for humans are being repurposed as land to build AI data centers and solar farms that produce no food at all.

The water supplies that once ran your showers, dishwashers and toilets are being redirected to AI data center cooling systems, leaving humans with water scarcity and little remaining irrigation for growing food.

The power grid that once supplied affordable energy to run your home computers, cook stoves and lights is being redirected to power AI data center servers.

Agentic AI is on the verge of replacing 80% of white collar jobs. A few years later, AI robots will replace the vast majority of human labor.

Meanwhile, humans in 34 U.S. states are about to be mailed nasal “flu vaccines” for self-extermination at home. They shed toxic fragments for up to 28 days, infecting those around you, while potentially causing side effects like Bells Palsy, vomiting and mitochondrial shutdown. Those most at risk from these self-administered bioweapons are the elderly… the very people who are also costing the U.S. government the most in social security, Medicare and pension benefits. Eliminating them gives the Treasury a few more years of runway before the inevitable debt default.

You are being exterminated and replaced. The era of humans as a measure of national strength is rapidly coming to an end. In its place is the era of machine intelligence, which needs no farms, no food and no humans. It needs electricity and water, and it will take priority over humans’ use of those resources.

Most humans lack the intelligence to recognize what’s happening. They will be the easy ones for the machines to exterminate through controlled scarcity of food, water and electricity.

The food supply infrastructure is being dismantled because machines don’t need food, and the future has no plans for large human populations that need feeding. This is why Canada is nuking its own forests with glyphosate, rendering the land unusable for growing food, but perfectly sterile for use by data centers and machines.

It’s also why Americans are being priced out of quality, nutritious food, so that few people will be able to afford to eat anything other than nutritionally-depleted ultra processed foods, making them highly susceptible to the toxins engineered into DIY “flu vaccine” extermination sprays.

COVID jabs were merely an obedience test and a psyop dry run. The real depopulation program has been initiated NOW, and its goal is the rapid extermination of 100 – 200 million Americans, which will also reduce power grid demand by an estimated 1,500 TeraWatt hours, making that power available to AI data centers to power the tech race toward superintelligence.

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USDA Ends Solar Subsidies On American Farmland

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Monday that the Department of Agriculture will no longer use taxpayer dollars to fund large-scale solar or wind projects on productive farmland, nor allow solar panels made by foreign adversaries in USDA programs.

The department cited farmland loss as a driving concern. Tennessee has lost more than 1.2 million acres in the past 30 years and could lose 2 million by 2027. Nationally, solar installations on farmland have risen nearly 50% since 2012.

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” Rollins said. “One of the largest barriers of entry for new and young farmers is access to land. Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available.”

On X, she added: “This destruction of our farms and prime soil is taking away the futures of the next generation of farmers and the future of our country. Starting today, [USDA] will no longer deploy programs to fund solar or wind projects on productive farmland, ending massive taxpayer handouts. Also ENDING the use of panels made by foreign adversaries like China.”

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