A couple of my friends made comments in anticipation of my column this week believing that I would talk about the state of the union address or the acquittal of President Trump but by the Senate. The only comment I will make along those lines is that it's interesting to read the Fact Check articles posted by my liberal friends on social media. The majority of them don't actually go to source material to see if the claim is true or not. If your fact check source does not cite or link to source documents, then it's probably the same as Snopes or Politifact: wrong.

What I do want to discuss today is the continuing push not only across the nation but right now in the state of New Mexico for the green energy programs. Whether it's the green new deal of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or what our governor is proposing for the state of New Mexico, they are all doomed to fail. All similar programs have failed to meet expectations but more importantly the unintended consequences are often more harmful to our environment than the fossil fuel energy they are intended to replace.

In the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, what is a highly touted project is funded in part by $737 million in loan guarantees from the federal government. Then President Obama said this would be the future of electrical generation for many of us in the western United States. The project was technologically new but considered to be a giant leap forward in the generation of solar energy that could solve many of the shortcomings of traditional solar panels. To keep it on the level that most can understand, giant mirrors focused the sun's rays onto a tower and advanced molten salt energy storage was used to create power. No, I don't understand it either.

The project started construction in 2011, was expected to be online in 2013 and was supposed to deliver 110 kilowatt hours of energy with 1.1 billion gigawatts of storage by the time it reached full capacity. NV Power was its sole customer promising to purchase all electricity at a price of $0.135 per KW hour. At the time, the average cost per KW hour was $0.12. I thought it was supposed to be cheaper than fossil fuel-generated electricity. At any rate the project never even approached 50% of capacity, suffered significant technical problems with the storage technology and finally shuttered last year.

This is a perfect example of the government picking winners and losers. When politicians make promises such as developing green energy they often forget that creating the technology that will deliver upon the promised goals takes time. They often ignore this fact and push projects like this forward when it is more likely than not it will fail. The taxpayer gets stuck with footing the bill for failure. in a privately funded venture there are consequences to the investors if the project fails thus they keep pressure upon the management to be as efficient as possible and as realistic in their goals as possible. There is no such incentive for the investors in government backed projects because there are no consequences if it fails.

Problem #2 that was an unintended consequence takes us to the wind farms where many of the turbines are being decommissioned because they have worn out. The towers and the mechanical parts can be recycled because the majority of those are made out of steel. The turbine blades cannot be recycled efficiently because they're made of a fiberglass and polymer material. Because of their size they are also difficult to transport which means if they want to send them somewhere it cost them a lot of money. So now they are disposing of them in local landfills. Since many of these wind farms, especially the large ones, are in rural areas most of the landfills are not large enough to be able to deal easily with the extra waste.

Solar panels are also similarly being decommissioned because they wear out or are damaged by things like hail storms. They contain mercury and cadmium and are similarly difficult to recycle so they are being disposed of in landfills as well, where the poisonous metals will eventually leak into the soil and possibly the groundwater. There have already been documented cases where this has happened but you certainly do not hear the environmentalists screaming bloody murder. Imagine that. Liberals being hypocrites.

One of the things that Conservatives believe is that if there is a problem the private market will find a solution. That has been proven over and over in history. Karl Englund Is a researcher and chief technological officer of Global Fiberglass Solutions. That company has developed a way to crush the turbine blades into pellets the size of chocolate chips. The resulting material can then be recycled to build things like decks, pallets, boats, and a host of other products. They have a plant in Texas and are building a second in Des Moines. But because the technology is fairly new and there is not yet a huge market the cost is still fairly high. However as they are able to overcome some of the obstacles that cost will come down especially as demand for the finished product they create increases. Of course they are doing this with private funding but if you believe that our government should get involved in funding ventures, why not one like this?

And I have not even touched on all of the problems that go into building solar or wind electricity generating plants such as the mining of materials needed to build the structures or the lithium batteries and how the actual environmental footprint of so-called green energy resources is larger than that of fossil fuels. But those are things that we can ignore because the stated goal is so worthy. Wouldn't it be nice if we all had that kind of standard for judging our successes or failures in life?