” The Solyndra technology was far from innovative, much less game-changing. The DOE … failed to quantify the elasticity of production costs in a highly competitive market where solar panels are a commodity.”
“Given the many other companies with shaky financials that have received loan guarantees, I expect we’ll see more and larger epic fails like Solyndra in the coming years.”
– Robert Peltier, “Epic Fail, POWER, October 2011, p. 6.
The seasoned warnings against politically correct, market incorrect technologies for electric generation by POWER magazine editor-in-chief Robert Peltier are now being vindicated. Peltier did not anticipate the unseemly crony capitalism involved in such cases as Solyndra, but he knew that there was trouble ahead because of the technological problems of converting very dilute, intermittent energy into affordable, dispatchable power flows.…
Continue Reading“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.’”
– Joe Romm, quoted in Thomas Friedman, Is the Inflection Point Near?, New York Times, March 7, 2009.
“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”
—Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]
I know…. We free-market optimists–and we ObamaCare, ObamaEnergy, etc. pessimists–are like the chap who jumps off the skyscraper and reports that everything is breezy on the way down.
But we have been jumping off buildings ever since Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population was published in 1798.…
Continue ReadingIt was five years ago that I began to become aware of energy and the importance of its role in everything. Now as a regular contributor/columnist for many online commentary sites and newspapers, as well as a regular guest on radio and TV programs, people often comment on my passion for the subject of energy. They wonder how I became so engaged in a topic few people even care about.
My newest book, my twentieth but the first in the current affairs genre, explains my passion. Energy Freedom attempts to present energy in such a way that it becomes a subject everyone is aware of, can understand, and wants to influence.
Background
I do not come from an energy, science, or public policy background. I’ve spent my life in speaking and writing either as a communicator or a trainer of communicators.…
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