WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) - The House budget bill that narrowly passed in an early morning vote on Thursday would effectively put the brakes on a clean energy production boom in the United States spurred by subsidies enacted in 2022.To quote Stephen Green in his Instapundit post, “Here’s a tip for Reuters: It’s not a boom if it’s financed by tax dollars and summoned into existence by mandates. It’s just another boondoggle.”
Republican lawmakers' "one big beautiful bill" to carry out President Donald Trump's plan to cut taxes and boost spending on the military and border enforcement would end Biden-era tax credits for clean energy projects years sooner than planned in an earlier draft, rendering them unusable for most companies.
Clean energy – aka Green energy – sounds great, but the means of achieving has been less than effective. Those pushing it think of two main sources for that energy – wind and solar – while ignoring other more tradition energy sources of clean energy such as hydro and nuclear. While the legislation mentioned in the Reuters article affects the monies brought forth by the Biden administration in 2022, the long list of clean energy programs that have not met their goals but have eaten up billions of taxpayer dollars goes back to at least the George W. Bush administration, but a lot of taxpayer money was spent during the Obama administration for clean energy programs that failed, with Solyndra being just one of them, as well as desert solar plants like the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating in the Mojave Desert which has never produced anywhere near the amount electricity promised by the developers. (The plant is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2026.) Another failure has been the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Tonopah, Nevada which which was shut down in 2019 after its only customer, NV Energy, canceled its contract. This was after almost $1 billion had been spent on the project of which $737 million was from government guaranteed loans.
How many more billions have been wasted on wind farms and large solar photovoltaic arrays that haven’t lived up to the hype? Experience has shown us that wind is a loser, particularly since the promised longevity of wind turbines has been found to be optimistic at best and the maintenance and repair intervals have been a lost shorter as well. Their dependence of weather is another weakness to proponents choose to ignore even when we have seen the effects when there is no wind just when the electricity from those wind farms is needed the most. (Texas and Germany are two places that have proven that to be a problem over the past few years.)
I’d rather see all that money being spent on nuclear power, particularly advanced Generation III and IV reactors, and specifically Small Modular Reactors that are built in a factory and then shipped to the power plant sites to be installed. Nuclear is not dependent upon weather, can provide baseload power 24/7/365 for years between refueling. Some designs like Molten Salt Reactors or Liquid Fluorine Thorium Reactors can be refueled while they are operating.
Another advantage to nuclear? They don’t take up nearly as much land area as wind or solar.
But will any of that happen? Maybe. At least we are seeing some action being taken by government at both state and federal levels to reduce much of the overly restrictive regulations and overly long licensing process. There are a number of new nuclear power plant projects in the works.
Only time will tell if any of them come to fruition.