Tag: solar power

California Program Gives Free Solar Panels to Illegal Aliens

A California climate change program has spent $49 million to hand out free solar panels to illegal migrant homeowners, a shocking report revealed.

The Farmworker Housing Component of the Low-Income Weatherization Program is one of the state’s many climate change initiatives, and this one is aimed at farm workers — including those who are in the U.S. illegally, according to City Journal researcher and writer Christopher Rufo and his co-author Austen Hufford.

The program is part of California’s multibillion-dollar cap-and-trade system which “taxes carbon producers and redistributes approximately $3 billion per year to energy programs and left-wing social causes — all under the banner of fighting ‘climate change,’” the two wrote.

Rufo and Hufford found that California has spent about $49 million on the program to hand out free solar panels to recipients, some of whom are illegal aliens.

The company that runs the program is called Nonprofit La Cooperativa Campesina de California. La Cooperativa then partnered with MAROMA Energy Services, which describes itself as “minority owned.” These two have contracted out the installations of said solar panels.

As Rufo and Hufford note:

These organizations have heavily advertised the program to California’s nearly 900,000 agricultural workers, half to three-quarters of whom are illegal immigrants. In its official documentation, California’s Department of Community Services and Development acknowledges that non-citizens are eligible for the program and that they even accept identification from foreign governments.

In a Spanish-language radio broadcast, Natalie Velores, a program manager for MAROMA, confirmed that participants do not need “legal status” in the United States and can use a matrìcula consular, a common form of identification that the Mexican consulate provides to migrants who have crossed the border, to apply.

These companies confirmed that legal citizenship is not required to be afforded the free solar panels.

The providers also mounted an extensive information drive by sending representatives out into the farm worker communities across the state to let them know how to get their free solar power systems.

But, while a ton of cash has been spent on this program, only 2,000 families have been the recipients of the free solar systems to date.

“That means the State of California has allocated roughly $23,000 per household for its program to provide free solar panels, refrigerators, and other services — a number that raises serious concerns about financial accountability,” Ruffo and Hufford wrote.

Finally, it appears that at least one politically connected activist is at the center of these groups that are reaping millions from the state. The man, Mauricio Blanco, “worked as a project manager for La Cooperativa Campesina de California, which has been awarded at least $10.7 million by the state; is currently listed as an executive of MAROMA Energy Services, which has been granted nearly $34 million from La Cooperativa for ‘weatherization’ services since 2017; and is CEO of John Harrison Contracting, a firm that appears to have done much of the solar installation work.”

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Meta Inks Deal For Solar Power At Night, Beamed From Space

The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights: Meta has signed an agreement with the startup Overview Energy that could see a thousand satellites beam infrared light to solar farms that power data centers at night.

In 2024, Meta’s data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity — roughly enough to power more than 1.7 million American homes for a year — and its need for compute power is only increasing. The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power sources, with a focus on industrial-scale solar power plants.

Typically, data centers turning to solar power must either invest in battery storage or rely on other generation sources to operate at night.

Overview Energy, a four-year-old, Ashburn, Virginia, outfit that emerged from stealth in December, has a different solution: The company is developing spacecraft that collect plentiful solar power in space. It then plans to convert that energy to near-infrared light and beam it at sufficiently large solar farms — on the order of hundreds of megawatts — which can convert that light to electricity.

By using a wide, infrared beam to power existing terrestrial solar infrastructure, Overview thinks it can sidestep the technological challenges and safety and regulatory issues that bedevil plans to transmit power to Earth through high-power lasers or microwave beams. CEO Marc Berte says you’ll be able to stare right into his satellite’s beam with no ill effects.

The technology would increase the return on investment from building solar farms and reduce reliance on fossil fuels — if it can be deployed at scale.

Overview says it has already demonstrated power transmission to the ground from an aircraft, and is planning to launch a satellite to low Earth orbit in January 2028 to perform its first power transmission from space.

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IDF probes video showing soldiers destroying solar panels in Christian-Lebanese village

The IDF has launched an investigation into a video in which Israeli soldiers are seen destroying solar panels in a village in Lebanon, Israeli media reported on Saturday night.

The destruction took place in the village of Debel, the same village in which an IDF soldier was photographed smashing a statue of Jesus last week.

KAN also reported that the solar panels were civilian infrastructure, being used by hundreds of residents of the village who had not been evacuated from their homes, with the IDF’s permission.

“The actions seen in the video are not in line with the IDF‘s values and the conduct expected of its soldiers,” the IDF told KAN. “The incident is under investigation. Based on its findings, command measures will be taken accordingly.”

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Sen. Bernie Sanders, Meet ‘Just the Facts’ on Renewable Energy Myths and Realities

Hardly a day goes by without luminaries of the left like Vermont’s Independent Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders pumping half-truths, undocumented claims, and outright lies about the evils of fossil fuels versus the saintly characteristics of renewables like solar and wind power.

Here’s a typical example of the routine sort of cant Sanders deals on energy issues: “At a time when solar and wind are the cheapest forms of new energy in the world, Trump wants to open a BILLION acres of US water to oil drilling. Why? To line the pockets of his fossil fuel billionaire friends. The rest of the world moves forward, we get left behind.”

Thanks to the sharp-eyed researchers working for James Agresti’s Just Facts (based in Conroe, Texas), exposing the fallacies and fables in Sanders’ energy claims is no more difficult than a mouse click and a few minutes of illuminating reading. Apparently it’s not easy enough for editors and reporters at major mainstream media outlets to check out claims like those peddled by Sanders before publishing them as reliable.

Consider these 14 points from a Just Facts evaluation of the Sanders tweet quoted above:

  • The assertion that solar and wind are “cheap” is based on a metric called “levelized costs,” which fails to account for the fact that wind and solar don’t produce energy when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Thus, they must be backed up by expensive energy storage systems or technologies that generate electricity on demand, like natural gas.
  • Due to the unreliability of solar and wind, the U.S. Energy Information Administration warns that its levelized costs for solar and wind “are not directly comparable to those for other technologies,” a vital fact that proponents of wind and solar often ignore.
  • After 40+ years of the U.S. government aggressively subsidizing solar and wind while discouraging the use of fossil fuels through taxes and regulations, solar and wind provided only 6.6% of all U.S. energy in 2024.
  • In addition to the federal government, some states have subsidized solar and wind so heavily that the New York Times reported in 2024 that “thousands” of “renewable energy” companies “are reeling” from a reduction in only one California solar subsidy, causing a “sharp decline” in rooftop solar installations.
  • Per a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency, “Although renewable energy technologies are becoming more cost-competitive,” “roughly 87% of global renewable utility-scale capacity growth in 2023–2028 is expected to be stimulated by policy schemes” in which “government policy is the primary driver for the investment decision.”
  • Despite claims from politicians like Gavin Newsom that solar is the “cheapest form of energy,” his state of California — which gets more of its electricity from solar than any other state — has the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S., or more than twice the national average. This elevated rate doesn’t even account for all of the government spending on solar that is borne by taxpayers instead of consumers.
  • In Germany, which is a “global leader in sustainable energy production,” the average price of household electricity is 3.5 times that of the United States.
  • A diverse array of scholarly publications document that affordable energy is “essential for public health and economic prosperity,” while high energy prices drive up hunger, drive down wages, stoke unemployment, and harm people in a wide variety of other ways.
  • While admitting that “past economic growth and poverty reduction have been associated with high GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions,” a 2024 World Bank report calls for “trade-offs” because “ending poverty for the 3 billion people who struggle on less than $6.85 a day would come at a high cost to the environment.”
  • Contrary to claims that green energy subsidies create “good paying” jobs, they actually enrich selected investors while neglecting workers. As explained in scholarly publications like the encyclopedia Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, the financial benefits of renewable energy subsidies “largely accrue to the owners of capital” because “energy development” is “capital-intensive,” and growth in “the green jobs sector does not necessarily imply net job creation” since it reduces the jobs “that would have been produced from fossil fuels,” and thus, “net job creation may be zero (or negative).”
  • Western Europe’s abandonment of fossil fuel production and nuclear energy has left it heavily dependent on Russia for energy.
  • A shell company in Bermuda with deep ties to Vladimir Putin and Russian oil companies has donated tens of millions of dollars to the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that oppose fracking.
  • A 2021 Bloomberg report documents that Communist China dominates global supply chains for key components of the solar industry, including 78% of the world’s supply of solar cells.
  • A 2025 report by the International Energy Agency states that the “battery supply chain” for electric vehicles has become “increasingly geographically concentrated” in China, which was “responsible for 80% of global battery cell production in 2024.” The report also states that “China has also established a near monopoly on battery components production.”

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NY’s ‘green elephant’ climate projects are collapsing under the weight of . . . math

Nearly two dozen New York clean energy projects are likely to get scrapped because the financial math doesn’t add up — though the state powers that be don’t want to admit that it never did.

Officially, the New York State Energy Research Development Authority, aka NYSERDA, is simply refusing to renegotiate state contracts to build various wind and solar plants, likely leading its counterparties to pull out.

These companies want more cash because the projects’ costs have soared since the deals were inked — mainly because NYSERDA winked at unlikely early estimates with an expectation that it would OK more realistic numbers later on.

In at least one earlier round, it simply rebid the contracts to reflect true costs, but that game is up now that those costs are becoming undeniable, and consumers are already screaming at the electric rate hikes needed to cover the bills.

It’s all part of the con that is New York’s 2019 Climate Act, a scam that set insane goals for decarbonizing the state’s electricity grid and outlined imaginary steps to paint the transition as practical. 

Green ideologues always figure deception is the best way to get governments started on such “reforms,” hoping they can then hector the politicians into keeping the scam going by concealing how exorbitant the costs really are.

Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo jumped on board as he eyed a presidential run; his successor, Kathy Hochul, declined to call out the lunacy until now, when she’s running for re-election as the economic pain starts to hit.

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Large Michigan Solar Projects Can Now Bypass Township Permit Denials. 122 of 148 Lawmakers Took Utility Money

One of Michigan’s electric utilities, Consumers Energy, announced plans to build up to 9,000 megawatts of solar power on 209,000 acres of farmland. The total size of these solar projects is about 326 square miles. That’s about 2.5 times the size of Detroit itself.

Nearly all these costs get added to citizens’ electric bills. Recognizing this would likely create opposition within townships, Democrat politicians in Michigan passed Public Act 233. It overrides a township if they deny a solar or wind farm permit.

For decades, Michigan’s 1,773 local township governments had the authority to decide whether a large solar farm could be built in their communities. In late November of 2023, Public Act 233 was signed into law. Larger solar (>50MW) and wind (>100MW) projects can now skip the voices of local residents. They now have almost no say in some of Michigan’s biggest industrial projects.

If the local jurisdiction denies the solar application, takes too long, or imposes excessive rules, the developer can bypass the township entirely. They can apply directly to the 3 person Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) for approval. All 3 commissioners are appointed by Democrat governor Gretchen Whitmer. In some cases, these developers can bypass townships from the onset.

PA 233 was introduced by MI House of Representatives Abraham Aiyash (D), a top Muslim lawmaker from the Detroit area. Every Democrat voted in favor of the bill, every Republican against (20-18). Like fascists, the MI Democrats took oversight from these small townships and gave it to MPSC. Democrats also control MPSC, which determines how much the two utility companies can charge their MI customers (Consumers Energy, DTE Energy).

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California to Keep Bird Broiling Solar Plant in Operation

I was in Las Vegas with my family the week before Christmas. On the drive back to California we passed a solar generation site called Ivanpah. If you haven’t seen this before it’s pretty striking in person. Instead of using photo-voltaic cells, the site has three towers surrounded by mirrors. The mirrors focus light and heat on the towers which use the concetrated heat to turn turbines.

The site was built with funds from several major companies including Google and a federal loan guarantee of $1.6 billion dollars. When this site opened in 2014, it was considered a step into the future of solar energy, but that quickly changed for several reasons. First, the site never produced as much power as was promised. Second, the cost of PV solar panels dropped dramatically to the point that rate-payers were paying a lot more for Ivanpah’s solar energy than they would be if the site were just full of regular solar panels. And thirdly, the site had some environmental problems including interfering with local tortoises and killing as many as 6,000 birds a year.

A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.

Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”

And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter.

Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.

For all of these reasons, both the Biden administration and the Trump administration agreed the state should shut down Ivanpah. Here’s a video Reason made about it last April.

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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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