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Monday, March 4, 2013 | 2:01 a.m.
Another view?
View more of the Las Vegas Sun's opinion section:
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Nevada is home to tremendous untapped clean energy potential, as Sen. Harry Reid eloquently described in his recent address to the Nevada Legislature. The sensible reforms to the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard that he outlined should be implemented without delay.
Nevada’s Renewable Portfolio Standard should chart a course toward additional solar, geothermal and wind investments while closing loopholes such as credits for an out-of-state hydroelectric project built more than a century ago.
While some sectors of the economy have slumped, renewable energy has provided jobs and tax revenues. The world’s largest solar power tower project is being constructed in Nevada, and the state is a leader in deployment of geothermal energy.
Last summer, Nevada’s first utility-scale wind project went online near Ely; 152 megawatts will generate more than $20 million in tax revenue for White Pine County and the state’s Renewable Energy Fund over the next 20 years.
The renewable energy industry wants to bring more projects and jobs to Nevada, and Reid’s plan could help keep this important economic sector thriving for years to come. The Legislature should lead the way.
The author is the executive director of the Interwest Energy Alliance, an industry trade association that represents renewable energy companies in the West, including Nevada.
LOL
STILL LOL
The solar and wind industries are on a slow grind. There is nothing special about Nevada.
California and Texas are ratting our lunch with their capability
With out the huge huge federal credits pouring in Nevada would not have even the dismal few project that that it has
Proponents of renewable energy suffer from holier than thou syndrome. A decade ago a British engineer designed a bagless vacuum. He and those that bragged about it said that it would redefine the vacuum industry and make paper bags obsolete and a thing of the past. Guess what? They were wrong. There is a place for renewable energy but not at the exclusion and obsolesence of conventional energy sources. The two should and will coexist. One no better than the other except in the eyes of the beholders. Most of whom have a vested interest, like the British engineer and his fans, to push and promote their own agenda.
CarmineD
From where I stand, Nevada has done a poor job getting green energy implemented in the state. Next to nothing is being done to educate young people about possible careers in that industry. Very little is being done to promote it, and that may be the way it goes, given the stranglehold and monopoly NV Energy has on our power and its rates.
Nevada is a state with plenty of sunshine, wind, and geothermal energy, yet it is barely being tapped. Any new technology is expensive, but with time and fine tuning, it will become less expensive. For the sake of our planet, young people, and future, we must get with the program and utilize renewable energy.
Blessings and Peace,
Star
Expensive, intermittent, low density, highly subsidized energy sources are not job creators. With natural gas so cheap and plentiful, why bother with 'green' energy unless your into crony capitalism.
Nevada Energy was forced to disclose what they are paying for solar and wind power.
It is 4x's more than they pay for coal and natural gas power.
So if you want your power bill to go up 4x's and almost everyting else to then go ahead and vote for people like Harry Reid.
Don't whine about the job loss and paycuts from a sick economy too. Doing dumb stuff like this hurts the economy.
While it is easy for an out of state renewable energy lobbyist to tell people in Nevada what they need, there is no market for all of this power. Nevada can't use it. They can't use all the renewable power that has been built in state so far. The Solar Reserve Crescent Dunes project wants a place on the ON Transmission line, but that transmission project was fast tracked and subsidized (350 million DOE loan) and the design flaws are so bad, that it will be years. Nevada does not have a grid to handle it all. Building a new grid for Nevadans will end up being the financial burden of the rate payers. But if you build that grid, there is still no local market for power. So that leaves California! But wait! California has a bunch of their own "green" ($$) energy projects! The builders of those need a California buyer too! They were not happy when LADWP bought the K-Road Moapa power from Nevada. California is maxing out on renewable power which is not stable for their grids either. So Reid can try to raise Nevada's RPS, but he can't make a market for the power appear out of thin air...unless your power rates triple.
The Spring Valley Wind Project employs only about 10 full time people. It was built next to Great Basin National Park in an area where it will kill eagles and is about 3 miles from a roosting colony for one million bats. Wind energy kills big raptors and bats. The numbers are far bigger than previously expected. Green energy? Senator Reid's vision for the future of Nevada is a mess.
And obviously a lobbyist from New Mexico really doesn't give a s%#T about the impacts all of these energy development would have on the natural landscapes of Nevada. You can get off the grid with solar panels. The price is coming down. That really scares Senator's Reid and Heller!
The obnoxious drill, baby, drill crowd has become as obsolete as "Sarah Palin's Alaska," the short-lived television show about a half term governor and her dysfunctional hillbilly clan.
Nevada has more sunshine than slot machines. It's time the state started taking full of this unlimited natural resource.
The naysayers are telling you that there is no recovery happening in housing too, but there is. Many parts of Las Vegas are seeing land prices double in just the last eight months and houses 15 to 30%. As builders and architects are seen incorporating a quiet dependable source of energy that lands on every property in Southern Nevada we will soon see an entirely different type of living and building standard.
Reid the Red being right? What a concept! The guy is a loose cannon and makes the dumbest assertions one can imagine yet, I have to admit, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Caribou Barbie may be obnoxious, but what makes her relevant is that she was right. "her dysfunctional hillbilly clan" good grief.
"Caribou Barbie may be obnoxious, but what makes her relevant is that she was right."
Palin is an uneducated nitwit but guess what? As half term governor she worked to increase her state's share of royalties from oil preoduction. So in a way she's smarter than the average Nevadan who hands out free gold to Big Mining.
Obama and Reid buy 500,000 solar panels and install them in ElDorado Valley with money borrowed from China, install smart meters on your home that were made in Mexico and make you pay for it. Bailout out banks with more money from China that completely ruins your home value and bankrupts half the solar companies in America. I think I know who the nitwit's are.
I started driving in the early 1970s when gas was about $.30 a gallon. Today it's nearly 15 times that. In a few decades from now when gas is $60 a gallon people are going to have clean renewable energy attached to their rear ends. I can't imagine too many people pulling into a gas station in paying close to $1500 to fill their pickup trucks full of gas.
Not only do we hand out free gold to big mining companies but Barrick is based in Toronto. Nevadans can't even dig their own holes in the ground.
The only reason we have to borrow money from China is because there's over 140 million Americans lined up for government assistance. They don't want to pay for it through higher taxes. We want everything but don't want to pay for anything so the Chinese fill the gap.
Sooner or later we will have NO choice other than to develop and use massive amounts of renewable energy such as sun, wind, and geothermal.
The price of a gallon of gas continues to rise and yet too many Americans continue to believe that we should stay the course with her dependence on oil.
Both parties are in bed with big oil but the Republicans are married to big oil. They're bought and paid for....
Yes, Nevada has great potential when it comes to the development of renewable energy and Harry Reid is working over time to see that the Silver State moves in that direction....
Also, 97% of the scientists out there who do research on climate change have said that our use of fossil fuels is largely responsible for the extreme changes that we're experiencing with the weather.
Of course, the right-wingers refuse to believe that. Nothing surprising there coming from a whole group of people who want to take this country back to 1901...
We rely very heavily on crude because it's relatively cheap compared to the renewables. Crude is cheap because of the financial crisis that hit years ago. In 2008 crude was approaching $150 a barrel. The financial crisis knocked nearly $100 off that price. At $91 a barrel today we are still way off the top set in 2008.
Had it not been for the financial crisis we would probably be paying between six dollars and eight dollars a gallon for gas today and renewables would be a much more important topic for discussion. Give it a while longer.
gerry hageman make several good points but he's not 100% correct when he said "the only reason we have to borrow money from China is because there's over 140 million Americans lined up for government assistance."
I believe gerry is forgetting about the two wars that we went to in the middle east and the costs of those two wars.
I wonder if gerry knows that the Bush administration, who took us to those wars, NEVER put the cost of those wars in the budget?
The war in Iraq has costs us a trillion dollars or more and the loss of some 4000 of our best young soldiers. Of course, the cost of that war continues to grow with the health problems suffered by returning vets.
Its Vietnam all over again with the government denying that many/most of the health problems currently suffered by Iraq veterans has anything to do with what happened to them during their service in Iraq...
I also wonder if gerry knows that approximately 50% of our homeless are vets?
Warrior said:
"Caribou Barbie may be obnoxious, but what makes her relevant is that she was right."
Ha! Ha! Ha! Now that's funny....
"The price of a gallon of gas continues to rise"
At what point does the cost of an electric car becomes financially a better choice then a gas car?
Electrical cars are smaller and lesser than gas cars in so many ways.
A Nissan Leaf cost about $29k (and that is after a $5k tax credit that Nissan is will get....your children deficit charge card is paying for that).
A similar gas car, the Versa Hatchback from Nissan is about $15k.
Let's say it cost $0 to re-charge your car and you don't need to spend about $5k in new batteries ever 5 to 6 years for the electric gar.
How much does the gallon of gas to be for you to break even over a 5 year period?
$11 a gallon.......we are pretty far from that.
Add in the cost of the battery replacement and it is like $20 a gallon.
I repeat what I said earlier:
"The price of a gallon of gas continues to rise and yet too many Americans continue to believe that we should stay the course with her dependence on oil."
Very few, if any, right-wingers are pro-active. Actually, the country as a whole isn't pro-active.
If we had no interstate highway system and there was talk of building one, you can bet that the conservatives would be very much oppose to building it. Thank god for Ike, a moderate Republican!
The same can be said about the Great transcontinental Railroad. Thank god for Abe Lincoln, a moderate Republican....
Today, the term "moderate Republican" is an oxymoron!
@Carmine.....in 2011 54% of the vacuum cleaners sold in the US were bagless [source, Consumer Reports, Industry Association] so your comparison might not be apt.
Let's be pro-active.
One day a steak will cost $1 billion.
Let's kill all the cows today.
Problem solved.
One day gas will cost $11 a gallon. Let's start using something that cost $20 a gallon in car cost.
Problem solved.
Makes perfect sense in a mind full of kool-aid and naive thinking.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I love reading the posts of my little buddy, "private pebble."
They remind me of SNL......
I'm also amazed that "private pebble" doesn't know what the word pro-active actually means or what it entails....
Gas at $11.00 a gallon? Wonder where that bit of information came from? FIXED NEWS? Rush Limbaugh?
The attitude expressed by rusty57 (5:19 a.m.), SgtRock (12:30 P,M.), and their ilk is all too common. The gist of their argument is "Why pay to develop the (currently) expensive alternatives when the (currently) cheap traditional sources are so plentiful?"
I've seen a wide variety of comments about how much more of the cheap traditional fuels remain in the ground: how long until the wells actually go dry. I have heard NO ONE argue that those traditional fuels are unlimited - that the wells will NEVER go dry.
I haven't seen a reference to "Solyndra" yet. Good. That project just proved that the venture capitalists are correct - it's possible to make a whole bunch of money backing a new idea - but you're going to lose a fair amount in the process. Yes, there WILL be mistakes and poor decisions, but the only people who never make those are people who do no work to begin with. The productive people are those who make mistakes, identify them, learn from them, and move on.
Is it better to spend money now to develop alternatives? Or is it better to hold off until the very last well goes dry - and then try to find, and pay for, some type of replacement?
I don't believe pro-active should mean act stupid.
Wasting money on a technology that is expensive is not being pro-active.
It has been around for about 70 years and the government has spend 10's of billions on it development each year in the last decade and not progess that much.
It is 4x's more expensive than coal and natural gas.
So if want to be "pro-active" then it would mean a big hike in power bills and a lot of jobs killed.
The more I read the posts and listen to the remarks of conservatives on such things as renewable energy, the more I'm convinced that ignorance will never go away.....
I'm reminded of what John Stuart Mill said about conservatives. He said:
"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid but most stupid people are conservative."
Sarah.......Great letter!
YES, Harry Reid is right again and the republicans
are wrong again and still brain-dead stupid.
Renewable energy is the future, period!
Never listen to ignorant republicans.
And never, ever vote republican!
"@Carmine.....in 2011 54% of the vacuum cleaners sold in the US were bagless [source, Consumer Reports, Industry Association] so your comparison might not be apt." Pat Hayes
Proves my point. Paper bagged vacuums are still made and sold in huge numbers. Look at the November 2012 edition of Consumer Reports which is the yearly version that rates and ranks vacuums. Note that CR divides the tests and ratings among both bagged and bagless vacuums equally. If you follow CR for vacuums, it's commentary warns that people with health issues related to breathing should avoid bagless vacuums due to the nasty dirt they spew into the air when dumping the dirt bins.
;-) That's a fail safe mechanism to guarantee paper bagged vacuums in the industry.
CarmineD
Teamster should take a thermodynamics course instead of parrotting dumbocrat talking points.
A 100 year supply of natural gas is the future. Wind power has been around since Jesus, there's a reason why it's a lousy grid source.
For Commenter Joe Lamy: Please consider writing coursework/curriculum for young people to promote green energy careers. These young people are our country's future, and the sooner we get them engaged and thinking about applying the technologies of solar, wind, geothermal, natural gas, and other green energy venues, the more savings we all will realize in lowering the costs of "mining" green energy, manufacturing the soft and hard ware for it, and having energy efficient devices in our homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Every school in our country should be pushing green power generation and create "the green power generation"!
Retooling Americans is nothing new. Racing to the moon led to our country changing the educational system to create more scientists and engineers, and look at today and all the inventions we have had in the last 60 years! That alone, should be argument enough why we MUST invest, retool Americans, and prepare for the future.
History tells us, that with every great invention, plenty of mistakes were made along the way. As the sayings goes, "You have to break a few eggs to make an omlet." The smart thing to do is LEARN from those mistakes, and cease from making that same mistake over and over again (a definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results).
The space race is a fine example to justify expense. Just think about it.
Blessings and Peace,
Star
Trust that bloviating gasbag Harry Reid to step in it. All those acres of sun panels in Boulder City will be dusted up by a slightest desert breeze, cutting their efficiency in half after a couple of hours - if there is anything to cut on cloudy days. To remove that desert dust will require an army of workers equipped with strong water sprays after every windy day. Well - for workers there will be no problem, we have tens of thousands of illegal aliens here willing to exert themselves for the new increased minimum wage. But water jets - in the desert??
@Marc: Interesting point about there being no water in the desert.
Also the efficiencies of photovoltaics as they age should be taken into account.
The solar technology being constructed around Nevada does work folks, however it doesn't require much research to see what a handful of politicians and Senator Reid's bigger picture contains. I would hardly describe it as eloquent, more in the realms of diabolical and fiendishly clever.
"Slave labor under totalitarian regimes"
five billion $$$$ and free land in the land of the free
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/...
Joe 50 years woud be good. With wind, they promise 20 but it's more like 7, or shortly after the warranties expire.
Nothing new coming from the conservatives....they refuse to look beyond the present situation and they have no pro-active agenda for America.
The comments made by both Lamy & Star hits the nail on the head. Yes, its time to re-tool America. It's time to rebuild this country starting with our infrastructure.
Look at our bridges for example. As Obama stated, we have approximately 70,000 bridges that need major repairs or in many cases need to be replaced.
Look at our power grid. It needs to be replaced. The most important component that drives our economy is that of cheap available energy that can be quickly moved from one part of the country to another.....
Re-building our power grid would allow us to do that..... With more available energy comes additional jobs!
I always get a kick out of the Republicans who claim that they know from a business stand point what is best for this country. Yet, they blindly stand behind all kinds of failed ideas and approaches that no longer work.
If political parties were forms of transportation, the GOP would be a horse & buggy!
You won't here this from the wind industry. Solar probably has the same problem:
Efficiency of wind power deteriorates with age.
The report concludes that a wind turbine will typically generate more than twice as much electricity in its first year than when it is 15 years old.
The report's author, Prof Gordon Hughes, an economist at Edinburgh University and a former energy adviser to the World Bank, discovered that the "load factor" -- the efficiency rating of a turbine based on the percentage of electricity it actually produces compared with its theoretical maximum -- is reduced from 24 per cent in the first 12 months of operation to just 11 per cent after 15 years.
The decline in the output of offshore wind farms, based on a study of Danish wind farms, appears even more dramatic. The load factor for turbines built on platforms in the sea is reduced from 39 per cent to 15 per cent after 10 years.
Prof Hughes said in his conclusion: "Adjusted for age and wind availability, the overall performance of wind farms in the UK has deteriorated markedly since the beginning of the century.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/...
The President's nominee for Energy Secretary is an "all the above" proponent. Including fracking. As a physicist and politician, Earnest Moniz is a very strong candidate for the job and likely to get the nod from both sides of the aisle.
http://news.yahoo.com/energy-nominee-fav...
CarmineD
Harry Reid has never been right.
Some people slavishly follow Democratic policies. Even when the policies fail. Probably because their parents were Democrats.
Carmine.....
PRESIDENT OBAMA has said many times that he is
an all of the above proponent.
Wind and solar are part of "all of the above".
And he may approve that dirty oil pipeline from
Canada.
You republicans need to quit crying about wind
and solar.
They are here to stay.
And we will still be using dirty oil too.
All of the above.
Rough.....
Some people slavishly follow republican policies.
Even when the policies fail.
Probably because their parents were republican.
Lucky for the majority, republicans are the
minority party in this country.
DEMOCRATS FOREVER!
"And he may approve that dirty oil pipeline from
Canada." Teamster
He will finally after 4 years of rolling over for the Hollywood green power celebrities.
Why? Not because we need the oil. You said that yourself on many occasions here when you supported the President's lame decision to nix the pipeline. J-O-B-S! 16,000 direct hires with more downstream.
Alberta tar sands are the third largest oil reserve in the world. Canada is one of the America's best and most loyal allies. The partnership is a win win.
CarmineD
Teamster: You know well that former Energy Secretary Chu who never owned and used a POV was bent on letting gas prices rise to $8 a gallon just like Europe. And he and his lackies, with President's Obama's blessing, declared war on coal. That's not all the above. Fortuntely "fracking" fracked him [Chu] and natural gas prices dipped precipitously and the US is now the Saudi Arabia of that energy resource. Not to mention more US J-O-B-S!
CarmineD
A 'teamster' against building a pipeline? Back to the rubber room!
"A 'teamster' against building a pipeline? Back to the rubber room!" Rusty57
Obviously Teamster's blind loyalty to the President trumps his loyalty to his union brotherhood. Every major labor union in the US has, was, and is for the Keystone Pipeline. Not this Teamster. James Riddle Hoffa is rolling over in his grave, wherever he may be, and that's hard for 37 year old dust to do.
CarmineD
But then let's remember it was the two good Democrat Kennedy brothers that put Hoffa in jail and the evil Republican President Nixon who pardoned Hoffa and got him out.
CarmineD
Those green and renewable energies -- solar, wind, geothermal, plant-derived -- are all energy balance-negative (they require more conventional energy to produce than they can generate), unreliable, extremely expensive, and environmentally destructive. Our dirty Harry had never met an engineer in his life - just eco-nazis, sozis, union goons, and other "liberals", "progressives", and similar leeches living off government largesse.