Subsidizing The Sun
- Solar Subsidies
What Do They Mean?
page 2 of 3
Federal Business Tax Credits, 15%     $2,700
Federal Investment Credit, 10%            1,800
California Solar, 25%                         4,500
                                                     9,000

Immediately you are $3,000 ahead. I will also buy the
power from and the use of the bio-machine at
$10/month; that pays your interest. The amazing thing
about these bio-machines is that if you buy two of
them, they automatically produce more within a year.
There are no windmills or PV modules that can do that.
We are at work on further tax breaks for this amazing
solar powered bio-machine. Buy now while the horses
last!
The tax credits attract a certain, high pressure sales
technique, such as telephone canvassing. This was
never present in the water heater or space heater
business. The solar tax credits have dipped the average
homeowner in butter—he’s a tasty customer to a good
salesman. It is a shame to think of the country using all
this sales talent to sell itself equipment that doesn’t
benefit it. Some people want to blame the solar
salesmen for the present situation; the country is busy
buying solar heaters with simple paybacks of 30 years
or even in some cases 50 and 100 years, and many of
the heaters won’t last 20 years! You can’t blame the
salesmen and entrepreneurs—they’ve been specially
invited to sell the country this equipment.
Ten years ago, the environmentalists proved that the
public was gullible about the energy crisis, and that the
oil and nuclear power companies were unable to
adequately defend themselves in any debate on energy.
Together; the environmentalists and the politicians
getting in on the stampede, decided to solve the energy
crisis—not by taking any risks themselves, but by
using human wave attacks of unarmed taxpayers. The
environmentalists pretend to be worried about
squandering our last fossil fuels, about mining the last
ton of coal and pumping the last barrel of oil. To
manage the crisis they foresee, they are exhausting a
much more important resource—our freedom. They
have inflicted us with a government plan to save energy
which does nothing of the sort; it only raises taxes. The
environmentalist’s concern for the engine which runs on
oil is boundless; his concern for the human, whose most
important fuel is the freedom to pursue his own self
interest, is another matter. Freedom does not exist in a
great vein under the ground like coal. In our society,
which spends more and more time replacing qualities
with numbers, the idea of freedom or liberty becomes
something people are uncomfortable discussing. The
environmentalists ignorantly “know” they can prove the
crisis they point toward with simple arithmetic. The
citizen, suffering under the rigid government plan, has
no meter reading or tonnage report to defend the
depletion of freedom.
You cannot subsidize solar energy in the ways you
subsidize oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear energy. The
uses of solar energy are too varied and the flows of
energy too hard to monitor. The energy produced by a
coal mine or an oil well is fairly easy to measure; you
simply count the tons of coal or the barrels of oil—a
subsidy can then be extended according to the quantity.
In the case of solar energy, it isn’t so easy to measure.
If the advocates of solar subsidies calculated that fossil
fuels received a subsidy of $1.00 per million Btu and
they wanted to have the same subsidy, how would they
go about measuring the uses of the sun and paying the
users? At night, the street lights go on in the city and
10,000 kW of subsidized power burn all night long. In
the morning, the sun comes up and the lights go off.
The sun should be getting an equal or perhaps a better
subsidy since it does a better job. No one has proposed
such a subsidy because the use of the sun is seen as
natural and is to be expected. Actually, designers take
care to allow light into cities. So far they simply haven’
t caught on to asking for a subsidy for not roofing over
the streets. An acre of alfalfa uses eighty million Btu/
day of solar energy. Should the farmer receive an
$80/day acre subsidy? In a 250 day growing season,
that’s $20,000 per acre per year. Again, no one has
suggested such payments for these uses of the sun—the
subsidies are saved for the ridiculous. If we move from
the alfalfa field to the florist’s greenhouse, we find
electricity competing with the sun; some of the flowers
are grown under electric lights. Agriculture, then, goes
on both under electric lights (fossil fuel powered) and
under the sun.
Materials are another field in which the sun competes
with fossil fuels. Forest-grown wood competes with
plastic made from fossil fuels. Should the forests be
subsidized? If you study the past ten years of the tax
credits, credits and subsidies have always been
proposed to the least cost-effective systems. The entire
effort for solar energy began with subsidies for active
solar systems, regardless of the fact that this was an
expensive way to accomplish what could be
accomplished more easily by changing the design of the
building and the materials used. The problem with the
“passive” use of solar energy was that it was harder to
separate the solar part from the rest of it. Today,
subsidies exist for solar collectors, but not for solar
greenhouses that also act as solar collectors.
An interesting sidelight is the special attitude that
makes for success in selling the public uneconomical
equipment. Brash, cynical self-confidence and
ignorance about energy are a good start. I believe many
solar companies which haven’t been publicly critical of
the tax credits have in fact been diffident about
supporting the lobbying, and have been poor at driving
home the sale of their equipment to those who already
have cheap energy. It may be hard to close in for the
Continue Solar Subsidies