The Trouble With Solar

The Democrats’ Green New Socialism proposes blanketing the U.S. with solar panels and wind turbines so as to replace all reliable forms of power generation with unreliable, intermittent sources. Everyone knows that solar panels don’t produce electricity at night, but there is another problem: they don’t produce electricity when it snows, either.

A friend took this photo and wrote:

I was up in Ramsey [Minnesota] picking up my camper, and next door is this fantastic $30,000,000 brand-new solar installation.

Doesn’t look like they’re making much electricity today, but it sure is going to make for good union jobs clearing the snow off these things.

Do they try to clear the snow off? I don’t know. It would be a massive undertaking and would add to the absurd inefficiency of solar power.

As is too seldom pointed out, one of the worst features of both solar and wind energy is that they are terrible for the environment. Via InstaPundit, Myron Ebell points out that if the Democrats are serious about the Green New Socialism, they will have to trash pretty much all existing environmental laws:

One aspect of covering the landscape with hundreds of thousands of square miles of windmills and solar panels is that to do so would require suspending federal, state, and local environmental statutes, permitting procedures, and land use plans. Forget about the Endangered Species Act’s habitat protections and prohibitions on killing endangered birds and bats. The Clean Water Act’s wetlands protections will have to be overlooked. Environmental impact statements that now take years to prepare, years to move through the permitting process, and more years to litigate, are out the window. Wind and solar projects will have to be permitted in days.

But leftists don’t care about the environment any more than they care about the economy. Their sole goal is the power to bully the rest of us. Everything else is a fraud.

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