On Aug. 11, a federal judge in the Northern District of California shot down a rule proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) that would have allowed the wind industry to legally kill bald eagles and golden eagles for up to three decades.
And little of that has gone toward creating “clean energy.” Funding recipients have frittered away millions completing paperwork—energy surveys, audits, data analytics—to meet California Energy Commission’s guidelines, which require $1.05 of energy savings for every dollar spent. Schools have spent more than half of the $297 million that they’ve received on consultants and auditors. As if California’s regulatory compliance industry needed more work.
California lawmakers from both parties are calling for more stringent oversight of a clean jobs initiative after an Associated Press report found that a fraction of the promised jobs have been created.
When Arizona regulators allowed the state’s biggest utility to charge a special fee on residential customers with solar panels in 2013, the decision was groundbreaking. Now utilities across the country are making similar moves.
“Not all forms of renewable energy get counted. Large hydropower projects, such as those generated by the dams off Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville or Folsom Lake, are excluded. So are most rooftop solar panel installations, as opposed to the large solar arrays in the desert, which do count. That is a point of contention in the current bill, with utilities and solar installers arguing that rooftop systems also should count. . . . Electricity rates are rising with the policies. According to an estimate from the California Public Utilities Commission, rates have risen three to five percent due to the renewable requirements. In the competition last year to draw the battery factory for the electric carmaker Tesla, Nevada won out over California, the company’s home. Part of the package, according to the New York Times, was discounted electricity rates.”
Three years after California voters passed a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean energy jobs by funding energy-efficiency projects in schools, barely one-tenth of the promised jobs have been created, and the state has no comprehensive list to show how much work has been done or how much energy has been saved.
Tesla Motors has earned more than $295 million in green subsidy emission credits during the past three years for a battery-swapping technology customers weren’t getting, a Watchdog investigation reveals.
Since 2006, U.S. households have received more than $18 billion in federal income tax credits for weatherizing their homes, installing solar panels, buying hybrid and electric vehicles, and other “clean energy” investments. We use tax return data to examine the socioeconomic characteristics of program recipients. We find that these tax expenditures have gone predominantly to higher-income Americans. The bottom three income quintiles have received about 10% of all credits, while the top quintile has received about 60%. The most extreme is the program aimed at electric vehicles, where we find that the top income quintile has received about 90% of all credits.
In his State of the City address in April, Mayor Eric Garcetti highlighted Turf Terminators, saying the hundreds of jobs that the company created were “some of the thousands of new, green jobs that have bloomed since I became mayor.”
California created nearly 2,000 clean energy and clean transportation jobs in the first quarter, to rank second in the nation behind Georgia, according to a report made public Tuesday.
The $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar power project in California’s Mojave Desert is supposed to be generating more than a million megawatt-hours of electricity each year. But 15 months after starting up, the plant is producing just 40% of that, according to data from the U.S. Energy Department.
If the subsidies shrink, the state’s solar-induced economic growth spurt – which has produced jobs, corporate profits and lower electric bills for homeowners and businesses – also could sputter.
Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.
In 2008, independent economists hired by the California Air Resources Board to review its plans to implement AB 32, the state’s landmark anti-global warming law, warned officials against presenting the measure as a broad boon to the state economy. Forcing California to use a higher percentage of cleaner but costlier fuels by 2020 was likely to hurt industries that competed with states and nations with lower energy costs, especially manufacturers. The most renowned of the economists, Harvard’s Robert Stavins, offered the sharpest critique and warned the air board that it risked discrediting itself if it didn’t acknowledge the law’s downside.
That’s according to Santiago Seage, chief executive of the Spanish-owned Abengoa Solar, which owns the embattled project. Seage told the trade journal Recharge News that without an extension of the federal Investment Tax Credit for solar plants, his company won’t have the security it needs to invest in building the project.