Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a combined $73 billion in profits—this includes BP, which that year had the infamous
spill intheGulfofMexico. Thecoal industryissimilarly retrenching itsworkforce,with
the greatest losses soon to come in the Appalachians. So don't be fooled: King CONG is
a part of the problem, destroying American jobs while making gobs of money and dis-
proportionate billions in subsidies.
Renewable-energy subsidies, while smaller, have been declining per unit over time
relative totheamountofpowertheyproduce.Forexample, inCalifornia, themajormar-
ket for the Rooftop Revolution so far in the States, rebates have fallen from more than
$2 per watt of solar power installed to less than $0.50 in most utility territories. So for
the solar industry, we can say that government support programs have been doing their
job in terms of creating an incentive for the industry to mature, increasing competition,
and decreasing prices. Indeed just in the past couple of years, as the price of oil soared
to more than $100 per barrel, prices for the solar consumer have fallen by more than 50
percent.
At the same time, solar businesses have boomed, and we've created jobs almost 10
times faster than the national average. Between August 2010 and August 2011, the num-
ber of people employed in the US solar industry grew 6.7 percent, to more than 100,000,
which is more workers than are employed in the coal-mining industry. We explore the
the difference with the fossil-fuel industry; that is, that solar has had a diminishing sub-
sidy over time while its prices have dropped and its employment has grown.
At the end of the day, it's dubious that renewable-market support payments should
even be compared with the corporate welfare that fossil fuels have received. As the IEA
writes,
Onlyasmall proportionshouldbeconsidered subsidiesor,rather,learning investments re-
quired to bring solar technologies to competitiveness. Their success would provide broad
accesstoaninexhaustiblesourceofenergyandhelpgivemorethanabillionpeoplearound
the world greater opportunity and economic freedom. By contrast, fossil-fuel subsidies
only serve to perpetuate a system that is ultimately not sustainable and distributes energy
production and its benefits by chance.
Reliability
“Unreliable”isaclaimmadebydinosaurtechnologywhenchallengedbyasuperiornew
competitor.“Don'tgetacellphone,”thetelephonyindustryoncesaid,“becauseyoumay
not be able to use it to call 9-1-1. Keep a landline just in case, for when you really must
have an incoming phone number for your business because that cell phone toy is really
not adequate to ensure service.” Sure, you couldn't compare the reliability of the cell
