I really don't get why the Republican party demonizes Solar and Wind. It has enabled people off grid to have energy when they wouldn't have. Many cabins outside city and county rely on this type of energy. Many people even use it as their sole source of energy. My neighbors moved to Arizona and they are fully solar. They don't have to be enslaved to the power company.
Solar is in so many products now. Path lighting, runs pumps and allows people to travel with solar on their motorhomes and vans. I have some solar spikes to drive away moles in my yard. And I am getting ready to make use of small charge controller to run some of my outdoor features. Its a fact of life now. Why demonize it?
And while I don't buy into the environmentalist religion of the world is going to end...……..,,,,Henny Penny there is no reason why we shouldn't go clean if we are able.
The solar that lights your sidewalk at night ...
...is nothing like the huge mirror farms or arrays that take up huge desert areas and have been known to cook transiting birds mid-flight.
Nor are those pioneer windmills that pumped water for the stock pond or generate electricity for a remote homestead ...
anything like the windmills with the 100+ ft. blades that routinely shred birds that would be protected.
At the same time windmills were shredding eagles, rigorous and extensive inspections by Federal Agencies found a total of six dead birds in thousands of wastewater holding pits in the oil patch in my state, and while the agency wanted to jail many more people, including oil Company CEOs, than there were birds and levy ludicrous (6-7 figure) fines, even though no one knew how the birds got in the pits nor their cause of death, at the same time hundreds, if not thousands of birds, including raptors and federally protected birds were shredded by windfarms with nary a peep.
Now, supposedly, these grant & guaranteed loan eating monsters are environmentally friendly because they don't consume fossil fuels while in operation, but no one factors in construction, transportation, erection, nor dismantling and disposal of components or windmills at the end of their service life.
In short, it is hypocrisy, writ large, not saving the planet, and the checks are commonly issued at the US Treasury with our money.
Having had a 40+year career in the oil industry, like the coal miners who were put out of work, I really don't like being forced via the taxman to support an industry in competition with my own, especially when it can't compete, and doesn't have to go by the same rules.
I'm not saying there isn't a time nor a place where these technologies are appropriate.
I am saying that considerable corruption has surrounded their funding from the public coffers, something that should not have happened for a commercial venture, which should compete in the marketplace on its own merits and not subsidies from the public coffers and by ignoring th laws everyone else has to go by.
