Government math

I've always wondered about government claims of "miles per gallon" for electric vehicles.  Since you don't put in a liquid fuel, how do you figure out a MPG figure?  But, I assumed they were making some kind of reasonable calculation, even though the number seemed wildly optimistic.

From the blog Green Explored and blogger Lindsay Leveen, we now know the EPA uses those same mathematical geniuses who are working on the Euro bailout.

The EPA allows plug in vehicle makers to claim an equivalent miles per gallon (MPG) based on the electricity powering the cars motors being 100% efficient. This implies the electric power is generated at the power station with 100% efficiency, is transmitted and distributed through thousands of miles of lines without any loss, is converted from AC to DC without any loss, and the charge discharge efficiency of the batteries on the vehicle is also 100%. Of course the second law of thermodynamics tells us all of these claims are poppycock and that losses of real energy will occur in each step of the supply chain of getting power to the wheels of a vehicle powered with an electric motor.

I started thinking about all of this last night when my wife asked me how the Honda Fit that is now available as an electric vehicle could get 118 MPG as the equivalent rating from the US EPA? I told my wife that was because the US EPA believes in Political Science and not Real Science and that I would investigate this claim for her. Well it is simple the US EPA uses a conversion factor of 33.7 kilowatt hours per gallon of gasoline to calculate the equivalent MPG of an electric vehicle.

Dr. Chu Chu of the Department of Entropy is instructing the EPA on thermodynamics in coming up with the 33.7 kwh per gallon. On a heating value of the fuel 33.7 kwh equals 114,984 BTUS which is indeed the lower heating value of gasoline. The fit needs 286 watt hours to travel a mile and the Green Machine agrees with this for the 2 cycle US EPA test with no heating, cooling or fast acceleration. Using this amount of energy per mile and the 33.7 kwh “contained” in a gallon of gas, the EPA calculates the Fit gets 118 MPG equivalent.

All of these calculations are in fact flawed as the generation of electricity, the transmission and distribution of electricity, the conversion of the AC electricity into DC electricity, and the charging and discharging of the vehicle batteries all have energy losses associated with these activities. The average efficiency of power generation is perhaps 42.5%, the transmission and distribution efficiency is perhaps 90%, the AC to DC conversion and the battery charge discharge efficiency is about 90%. Multiplying all these efficiencies one can calculate that the overall efficiency is 34.4% to get electric power from fuels at the power station into stored electrons within the plug in vehicle’s batteries.

On this basis the 118 MPG equivalent is 40.6 MPG actual for the Honda Fit which is not much of an improvement to the gasoline version of this vehicle that has an EPA rating of 35 MPG combined for city and highway driving.

Green?  You tell me.  And don't forget, that also is for a Fit with no heat, no air conditioning and no fast acceleration.  And no rational basis for existence.

A government agency cooking data to fit political goals?  To quote Captain Renault, "I'm shocked!"

Hat tip to Breitbart for the pointer.

Green video

As a followup to our post on the Obama administration's definitions of "green jobs", we bring you a video from Darrell Issa and the House Oversight Committee.



Amazing how simple truths can make a Democrat bureaucrat look so foolish.

"Green" jobs???

From Fox News:

The Obama administration on Wednesday acknowledged a wide-ranging definition of  "green jobs" that includes bus driver, bicycle-shop clerk and other unexpected lines of employment, which the chairman of the GOP-led House oversight committee said is being done for "clearly political purposes."

GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, made the assertion during a hearing on how the administration counts so-called green jobs and the Labor Department's recent change to how reporters can access key unemployment reports and other information.

The Labor Department "has jeopardized the integrity of employment data in some cases for clearly political reasons," he said.

Issa suggested the administration is reclassifying such jobs to prove that billions of taxpayer dollars, through the federal stimulus program, have created green, or environmentally-focused jobs, a major initiative for President Obama.

Control the language, control the debate.  Read it all.

Cronyism in the heartland

Although major firms like Solyndra have gotten deserved attention because of their huge federal croynism, that same disease is at work at the state level.  From Media Trackers Ohio comes this account of Toledo Blade reporting:

The Ohio Department of Development recently announced plans to audit Perrysburg solar-panel manufacturer Willard & Kelsey Solar Group LLC — also known as WK Solar — after the company failed to make regular debt payments on money it borrowed from taxpayers.  The company borrowed $5 million in taxpayer funds from Ohio’s Air Quality Development Authority “green jobs” program, as well as another $10 million in funds lent by the Department of Development itself.

The Air Quality Development Authority is a separate state commission but often collaborates on projects with the Department of Development.

As early as 2009, the Ohio Department of Development and the Air Quality Development Authority were aware of the company’s financial woes.  Company records provided to the state showed that WK Solar ran up $4.2 million in debt. Nonetheless, taxpayer funds continued to be pumped into WK Solar’s coffers.

At that time, state and federal officials had great expectations for the Perrysburg “green energy” company. Vice President Joe Biden joined then-Governor Ted Strickland to tour the plant, where Biden said the now-failing company was key to “our folks getting back in the game.” Massive taxpayer funding of the foundering green energy company has led critics to deride WK Solar as “Ohio’s Solyndra.”

In 2010, WK Solar executives — including CEO Michael Cicak and president James Appold — donated almost $25,000 to Gov. Ted Strickland’s re-election campaign. Cicak also donated to Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher’s US Senate campaign. Fisher served as director of the Department of Development under Governor Strickland.

Later that year, in July of 2010, the Department of Development lent WK Solar an additional $10 million in taxpayer dollars. Strickland’s administration also approved multiple deadline extensions for required financial reports, as well as deferrals for required loan repayments.

Records show that department officials were very aware of WK Solar’s financial woes but forged ahead with loan negotiations anyway. However, Strickland and Fisher both claim that they were not aware of any financial problems with the company whatsoever.

and more:

In December of 2011, WK Solar reported that it could not meet its promise to create over four hundred permanent jobs, a condition of the loan agreement with the state. Instead, as of this year, the company has created only fifty-one new jobs and has laid off forty employees. As reported by the Blade, no more than 72 people were employed by the company at any point in time.

William Mitchell, the company’s former chief executive officer, alleged that the company violated its contract by using Department of Development funds to pay other executives and to lend them money. Mitchell was fired in 2009, and died in 2011.

According to the Toledo Blade, before his termination, Mitchell copied company records showing that the firm spent thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds on entertainment expenses, including sports games in Detroit and Pittsburgh.

In the past few months, WK missed two monthly debt payments — $466,000 each — and has only made incomplete payments towards interest owed. The missed payments prompted the state to investigate.

That was Democrat Governor Strickland.  And Democrat Lt. Governor Fisher.   Just so you know.

The cronyism rot runs deep.

Thanks to Breitbart for the pointer.

Two years ago in California

Byron York, writing at the Washington Examiner, looks back to a day two years ago.

Two years ago today, May 26, 2010, President Obama traveled to Fremont, California to showcase a "brighter and more prosperous future" promised by the green-energy company Solyndra.

The solar panel maker went bankrupt last year, taking with it $535 million in taxpayer-funded loan guarantees.  More than 1,000 people lost their jobs.  The Obama administration had cut corners to rush money to Solyndra, with some of the beneficiaries being top Obama fundraisers.  Even as Solyndra failed, the administration considered giving it another $469 million.

But on this day in 2010, with Solyndra already facing serious obstacles, President Obama was filled with optimism. "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra," the president said.  "Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot.  But through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations.  This new factory is the result of those loans."

"We've placed a big emphasis on clean energy," Obama continued.  "It’s the right thing to do for our environment, it’s the right thing to do for our national security, but it’s also the right thing to do for our economy…When it’s completed in a few months, Solyndra expects to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across America and around the world."

"It's happening right now.  The future is here," Obama said.  "It's here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future."

Fifteen months later, Solyndra was bankrupt, and that taxpayers' money was lost.

Taxpayer's money.  Try this little exercise from now until November....everytime you hear "taxpayer's money", substitute "my money".  And realize how much has been either outright wasted or sent to prop up a crony of Obama.

If you have a strong stomach, the entire text of Obama's speech at Solyndra is included in York's article at the above link.

Green is good for the environment

Green energy....it's good for the environment!  Well, isn't that what they tell you.

Perhaps not quite so.  From San Francisco's CBS Television website:

Three months ago, CBS 5 caught Solyndra tossing millions of dollars worth of brand new glass tubes used to make solar panels. Now the bankrupt solar firm, once touted as a symbol of green technology, may be trying to abandon toxic waste.

It’s a tedious process. Slowly but surely, the shattered remains of brand new solar panel tubes head to a recycling plant in Hayward.

Meanwhile the next phase of the company’s liquidation is under way. It involves getting rid of all the heavy metals left inside the building that were used to make the panels.

The Fremont Fire Department’s Jay Swardenski oversees the cleanup. He said some materials, such as cadmium, are toxic, and hard to dispose of.

“They don’t degrade at all, so we want to make sure we don’t allow these materials to get into the environment,” he said.

It’s not just the leftover hazardous materials, but also the machinery used to apply them to the glass tubes. “Certainly those tools will need to be decontaminated, cleaned up, handled correctly as they are taken apart,” he said.

Swardenski told CBS 5 the disposal process is going smoothly in Fremont, but what about nearby Milpitas?

Solyndra leased a building on California Circle for the final assembly of its solar panels. But the cleanup at the leased building in Milpitas is in limbo, because Solyndra doesn’t want to pay.

CBS 5 found the building locked up, with no one around. At the back, a hazardous storage area was found. There were discarded buckets half filled with liquids and barrels labeled “hazardous waste.”

The building’s owner, a company called iStar, claimed in court documents, “there may be serious environmental, health and safety issues” at the premises. According to the documents, they include, “numerous containers of solvents and chemicals…and processing equipment contaminated with lead.”

“Essentially it looks like they left a pretty big mess behind,” San Jose State Assistant Professor Dustin Mulvaney told CBS 5.

Green? Really? The only green was the color of the taxpayer's money that went down that rat hole.

Thanks to I Own the World for the pointer.

Watch your wallet

Fox News has a report on the upcoming United Nations Rio summit.  Those world-government do-gooders have a plan and boy will it be coming for you.

The upcoming United Nations environmental conference on sustainable development will consider a breathtaking array of carbon taxes, transfers of trillions of dollars from wealthy countries to poor ones, and new spending programs to guarantee that populations around the world are protected from the effects of the very programs the world organization wants to implement, according to stunning U.N. documents examined  by Fox News.

The main goal of the much-touted, Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, scheduled to be held in Brazil from June 20-23, and which Obama Administration officials have supported,  is to make dramatic and enormously expensive changes in the way that the world does nearly everything—or, as one of the documents puts it, "a fundamental shift in the way we think and act."

Where have we heard about "fundamental transformation" before?  Oh, yes...now I remember.  It was part of that "Hope & Change" thing.

More from the Fox story:

That  huge catalogue of taxes and spending is described optimistically as “targeted investments  in human and social capital on top of investments in natural capital and green physical capital,” and is accompanied by the claim that it will all, in the long run, more than pay for itself.

Pay for itself?  Yep...sure it will.  Just like those florescent light bulbs.  Just like those electric cars.  Just like every other governmental "investment".

Read the whole story.  And remember.  The Obama administration supports these goals of "social justice". These are those folks who know what's best for the world.  Or so they keep telling us.  Do you believe it?

The Green scam with OPM

OPM - Other People's Money.  It's amazing how many things are done with those three letters.  Solyndra was a scheme with OPM.  The GSA scandal - again, spending OPM.  People are never as careful with OPM as they are with their own.

Today's story via Human Events:

One of the big recent “green energy” epic failures is A123 Systems, which raked in $300 million from the “stimulus” bill, plus another $135 million in Michigan state funding.  They’re currently teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and just got slapped with a class-action lawsuit for allegedly “making false and misleading statements” about manufacturing deficiencies in their products.

One of those products was the electric battery used in the Fisker Karma, a $100,000 electric sports car that literally dropped dead when Consumer Reports took it for a test drive.  A123 Systems was betting heavily on Fisker’s success – so heavily that they pumped $20 million of their own equity and cash into the auto maker.

Fisker got $529 million of your money from the Obama Administration, producing 500 manufacturing jobs.  Unfortunately, those manufacturing jobs were in Finland, not America.  Fiskers executives were quite proud of their wise decision to keep those jobs overseas.

Confronted by this horrific embarrassment, Obama apologists pointed to the Fiskers plant in Delaware, the lovely state from whence our Vice President hails.  They bought an old GM factory (built when the “G” stood for “General,” not “Government”) and planned to build a much more affordable $50,000 car for the common man in their American facility.  It’s called the “Atlantic.”  It doesn’t actually exist, and it probably never will.

That’s because Fisker has begun laying off workers left and right at its Delaware plant, “because it ran out of government loan money,” as USA Today put it.  “Fisker had failed to meet production and sales milestones it had promised in the loan agreement with the Department of Energy, so loan cash was shut off last May.”  They’re up to 66 layoffs now.

Fisker can't make it without OPM propping it up.  A123 is all about taking OPM.  Read the whole story at the above link.

And there's more.  Think of politicians who tout local pork projects with lines like "And 90% of the funding will come from the federal government - we only have to provide 10%".  That 90% is OPM.  But it just doesn't appear from the ether.  Ultimately, with any of these government funding projects, it's the American people who, in one way or another, provide the money that someone else gets to use.

At its root comes the fundamental question:  Is it better for the individual or the central planners to decide how to spend your money?  Those who want central planning say they know better and can make wiser decisions.  Look in the mirror and ask yourself "Do I really believe that some bureaucrat or politician knows more about what's best for me than I do?"  If the answer is "NO!!", remember to vote in November.  If the answer is "Yes", why are you reading this blog??  (And by the way, remember to vote in December)

Solyndra and the iceberg

Solyndra may only be the tip of the iceberg.  From Powerline:

Well, today we learn, courtesy of a Freedom of Information Act request by the Wall Street Journal, that fully one-third of the Dept. of Energy’s clean energy loan portfolio is on an internal “watch list” for being at high risk.  No wonder Obama is now saying, Solyndra—never heard of them, wasn’t us . . . per se.  Solyndra wasn’t an outlier: it is the model.

Maybe they are trying to delay the bankruptcies until after November.  Wouldn't put it past any of that bunch.

What did you say??

From the flip-flopper in chief:



Amazing.

In an interview with Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal, Obama said that Solyndra really “was not our program.” Rewriting history?  Or trying to?

The transcript from Real Clear Politics:

Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal : With all respect, it was kind of a gutsy move I think to come to a solar facility. Your administration has staked a lot on clean technology, green jobs. The biggest item most people know about that strategy is, of course, a company named Solyndra, which your administration gave loan guarantees to, that then went bankrupt and has been the subject of many investigations. Are you doing your "all of the above" strategy right if that's what we have to show for it -- Solyndra?

Obama: We are doing the "all of the above" strategy right. Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn't gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn't compete. But understand: This was not our program, per se. Congress -- Democrats and Republicans -- put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries, it's easy to raise money for startups, but if you want to take them to scale, oftentimes there's a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start up companies get to scale. And the understanding is is that some companies are not going to succeed, some companies will do very well -- but the portfolio as a whole ends up supporting the kind of innovation that helps make America successful in this innovative 21st century economy.

Do I wish that Solyndra had gone bankrupt? Absolutely not. And obviously it's heartbreaking what happened to the workers who were there. When you look at the overall portfolio, is it right for us to make sure that we're not just cashing in our chips and letting the Chinese or the Germans develop the technologies that we know are going to be critical in the future? I'm proud to say that we're going to continue to support it.

Solyndra, along with other "green" projects, was just about the money, the influence, and the politics.  Denying it now is ass-covering at its finest.

Green jobs

It seems that there is no limit to the chutzpah of the Obama administration.  From the Nevada Journal comes a story of a presidential visit to a solar energy plant funded by the federal government.  Unfortunately, the "stimulus" really didn't provide jobs or economic benefit:

President Obama will tout investments in “renewable” energy Wednesday at the local Copper Mountain Solar 1 plant, although the plant has only five full-time employees.

The plant, owned by San Diego-based energy company Sempra, was built in late 2010 at a cost of $141 million. Funding included $42 million in federal-government tax credits and $12 million in tax-rebate commitments from the state of Nevada.

Construction of the plant involved over 300 part-time jobs, but currently only five full-time employees operate the plant, a Sempra spokeswoman confirmed. That comes out to $10.8 million in tax-dollar subsidies per employee.

 Over TEN million dollars to create one job.  You could skip the investment, just pay someone $100,000 per year for over 100 years and still spend less money.  Where did these folks learn math?

In addition to wanting to create many new jobs, President Obama has claimed green-energy investment will decrease America’s energy costs and reduce the country’s dependency on foreign oil.

In Boulder City, however, renewables have produced no lower energy costs. Instead, in late 2009, the city approved a 35 percent rate hike, while power generated by Copper Mountain is to go to Southern California — rather than serve Nevadans whose taxes helped finance the plant.

So, the folks that helped to pay for the plant don't even get the energy from it.  And the green energy picture keeps looking uglier every day:

Nevada received over $1 billion in federal “stimulus” funds for energy and environmental projects, yet state ratepayers still pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Recently, the Nevada Public Utilities Commission approved yet another rate increase.

Solar plants aren’t the only government-funded energy projects in Nevada that haven't lived up to their proponents’ promises. The Reno Gazette-Journal recently reported that seven local windmills that cost taxpayers $1 million to install have only saved the City of Reno $2,785 in electricity costs over their 18 months of existence.

If we survive the Obama presidency, the green boondoggle will likely go down in history as the greatest heist in our existence.  Too bad most people don't know how bad it all is.  

Hat tip to The Lonely Conservative.

Juxtaposition of the Day

State Of The Union, Jan 24, 2012;

"In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries."

State Of The Battery, Jan 26, 2012;

Obama-backed electric car battery-maker files for bankruptcy

From Small Dead Animals.

Good intentions

Andrew Klavan looks at how the road to hell is paved.



Watch it a second time and keep your eyes on the graphics along the sides of the road. 

Now, if only he would do these same sendups for ads in the November election.

But it's Green energy

News item of the morning:

(Reuters) – Solyndra LLC failed to attract any bids on Tuesday from buyers who could have restarted production, brought back some laid off staff and kept the bankrupt solar panel maker operating, according to a company adviser.

Solyndra, which owes more than $500 million to the U.S. government, has said a turnkey buyer is the best hope for getting the most money for the government and other creditors. However, no turnkey bids were submitted by a Tuesday deadline, said company adviser Eric Carlson of Imperial Capital LLC.

It's such a great business, in a booming vitally important field.  Not to worry - somehow those loans will be repaid to the taxpayers.

Yeah, right.