October 16, 2012
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar speaks during a news conference, Friday, Oct. 12, 2012, in Las Vegas, in which he and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced a plan that sets aside 285,000 acres of public land for the development of large-scale solar power plants. The government is establishing 17 new "solar energy zones" on 285,000 acres in six states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. Most of the land,153,627 acres, is in Southern California.
(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration announced last week that it is setting aside 285,000 acres of public lands to be used for “commercial-scale solar development” – a total acreage amount that surpasses Rocky Mountain National Park, with 265,461 acres owned by the federal government.
“As part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy to expand domestic energy production, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today finalized a program for spurring development of solar energy on public lands in six western states,” the Department of Interior press release on the new project states.
“The Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for solar energy development provides a blueprint for utility-scale solar energy permitting in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah by establishing solar energy zones with access to existing or planned transmission, incentives for development within those zones, and a process through which to consider additional zones and solar projects,” the press release states. To Read More…..
My Take –The argument for alternative energy was that we were running out of fossil fuels, and use of those fuels was destroying the Earth via global warming. Both arguments are blatantly and abjectly false. For years there were those who were attacked unmercifully for saying this. Now we absolutely know everything they said is true, and everything the greenies and their acolytes and fellow travelers said is false.
The article goes on to say the wind and solar power projects have doubled under the Obama administration. So what? Even doubling that effort still represents a meaningless amount of energy to meet the nation’s needs. Furthermore, when all is said and done they will still have to have traditional power generation plants on backup to make up for those days when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
For those who don’t understand power plant power generation let me explain why that is amazingly expensive and wasteful. Power plants can’t shut down. They have to be working all the time. The turbines may not be turning (that is what generates the power) because they aren’t pumping steam through them, but the level of heat must be maintained at a high level in order to produce electricity within a reasonable time limit.
Even if they allow the temperature to drop significantly, it can only be allowed to drop so much or they can’t get the plant running in production for some time. When power plants shut down for maintenance the temperature must be lowered slowly or damage can occur. The same is true when they start them up again. That is time consuming and expensive. That means we are paying for energy we aren’t’ using to supply the nation with energy we don’t need.
Does anyone else think this is insane besides me?
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