Solar Power: Is It Time for the Big Push?

[Political Junky]

Solar power: Is it time for the big push?

Jan. 31, 2013 — There are great expectations for solar power, especially in the coming years, when the International Energy Agency projects solar to grow faster than any other renewable power. But what does science need to do to more fully respond to the opportunities ahead?

Recently, three researchers discussed this with fellow scientist Harry A. Atwater, Jr., director of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Material Interactions in Solar Energy Conversion, as well as member of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) at the California Institute of Technology. To really give solar power a push, the scientists raised advancing how new materials are created, developed and brought to industry.
"We need to engage with manufacturers and end-users of the technology as soon as possible, rather than spend years doing lab demonstrations before anyone talks with industry," said Michael Wasielewski, director of the Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center and professor at Northwestern University. "We need to take advantage of manufacturers' expertise in how things are really done. On our part, we need to let them know about promising materials sooner, so they start to think about commercialization pathways earlier in the process."
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[CrusaderFrank]

Turns out "Fossil fuels" are renewable, Earth just keeps making more of it, and it requires no fossils either

 

[PoliticalChic]

&#8220;The US Energy Information Administration estimates the subsidy cost of wind runs at $23.50 [dollars per actual megawatt-hour] and solar burns through a bit more at $26.00. Natural gas and petroleum, 25 cents. Coal, 44 cents. &#8220;Clean&#8221; coal, refined to environmentalis&#8217; standards, $29.81.&#8221;
Nickson, &#8220;Eco-Fascists,&#8221; p.123.

 

[there4eyeM]

The answer is yes.

 

[Mr. H.]

If Obama gets his budget as proposed, solar (and wind, etc) will get the "push" it needs...
at least $40 billion dollars taxed from oil and natural gas and pumped into alternatives/renewables.

If this shit can't survive in the marketplace, it has no "business" surviving at all.

 

[Political Junky]

If Obama gets his budget as proposed, solar (and wind, etc) will get the "push" it needs...
at least $40 billion dollars taxed from oil and natural gas and pumped into alternatives/renewables.

If this shit can't survive in the marketplace, it has no "business" surviving at all.

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

No, they don't.

 

[Political Junky]

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

No, they don't.

Mitt Romney&#8217;s Leniency Toward Corporate Welfare Queens : The New Yorker

CORPORATE WELFARE QUEENS

Mitt Romney once seemed like a moderate technocrat. But, as the Republican Convention and the video leak of his comments about the &#8220;forty-seven per cent&#8221; of Americans who &#8220;believe that they are victims&#8221; made clear, Romney now seems to fancy himself a small-government zealot, who promises the end of the culture of entitlement. Yet even as he assails people on Medicaid and Social Security, and those who receive the earned-income tax credit, for being &#8220;dependent upon government,&#8221; Romney has had strikingly little to say about another prominent group that&#8217;s &#8220;dependent upon government&#8221;: the many American companies whose profits rely, in one form or another, on government assistance.
From the days of high tariffs and giant land grants to the railroads, business and government have always been tightly intertwined in this country. But, in recent decades, what you could call the corporate welfare state has become bigger. Energy companies lease almost forty million acres of onshore land in the U.S. and more than forty million offshore, and keep the lion&#8217;s share of the profits from the oil and natural gas that they pump out. In theory, this is O.K., because we get paid for the leases and we get royalties on what they sell, but in practice it often works differently. In 1996, for instance, the government temporarily lowered royalties on oil pumped in the Gulf of Mexico as a way of encouraging more drilling at a time of low oil prices. But this royalty relief wasn&#8217;t rescinded when oil prices started to rise, which gave the oil companies a windfall of billions of dollars. Something similar happened in the telecom industry in the late nineties, when the government, in order to encourage the transition to high-def TV, simply gave local broadcasters swathes of the digital spectrum worth tens of billions of dollars. In the mining industry, meanwhile, thanks to a law that was passed in 1872 and never rewritten, companies can lease federal land for a mere five dollars an acre, and then keep all the gold, silver, or uranium they find; we, the people, get no royalty payments at all. Metal prices have soared in the last decade, but the only beneficiaries have been the mine owners.
In other cases, the government offers direct subsidies, like those which have helped keep many renewable-energy projects afloat. Farmers, despite food prices at record highs, still get almost five billion dollars annually in direct payments, along with billions more in crop insurance and drought aid. U.S. sugar companies benefit from the sweetest boondoggle in business: an import quota keeps American sugar prices roughly twice as high as they otherwise would be, handing the industry guaranteed profits.
The tax code, too, is a useful tool for helping businesses. Domestic manufacturers collectively get a tax break of around twenty billion dollars a year. State and local governments give away seventy billion dollars annually in tax breaks and subsidies in order to lure (or keep) companies. The strategies make sense for local communities keen to generate new jobs, but, from a national perspective, since they usually just reward companies moving from one state to another, they&#8217;re simply giveaways.

Read more: Mitt Romney&#8217;s Leniency Toward Corporate Welfare Queens : The New Yorker

 

[tjvh]

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

No, they don't.

Mitt Romney’s Leniency Toward Corporate Welfare Queens : The New Yorker

CORPORATE WELFARE QUEENS

Mitt Romney once seemed like a moderate technocrat. But, as the Republican Convention and the video leak of his comments about the “forty-seven per cent” of Americans who “believe that they are victims” made clear, Romney now seems to fancy himself a small-government zealot, who promises the end of the culture of entitlement. Yet even as he assails people on Medicaid and Social Security, and those who receive the earned-income tax credit, for being “dependent upon government,” Romney has had strikingly little to say about another prominent group that’s “dependent upon government”: the many American companies whose profits rely, in one form or another, on government assistance.
From the days of high tariffs and giant land grants to the railroads, business and government have always been tightly intertwined in this country. But, in recent decades, what you could call the corporate welfare state has become bigger. Energy companies lease almost forty million acres of onshore land in the U.S. and more than forty million offshore, and keep the lion’s share of the profits from the oil and natural gas that they pump out. In theory, this is O.K., because we get paid for the leases and we get royalties on what they sell, but in practice it often works differently. In 1996, for instance, the government temporarily lowered royalties on oil pumped in the Gulf of Mexico as a way of encouraging more drilling at a time of low oil prices. But this royalty relief wasn’t rescinded when oil prices started to rise, which gave the oil companies a windfall of billions of dollars. Something similar happened in the telecom industry in the late nineties, when the government, in order to encourage the transition to high-def TV, simply gave local broadcasters swathes of the digital spectrum worth tens of billions of dollars. In the mining industry, meanwhile, thanks to a law that was passed in 1872 and never rewritten, companies can lease federal land for a mere five dollars an acre, and then keep all the gold, silver, or uranium they find; we, the people, get no royalty payments at all. Metal prices have soared in the last decade, but the only beneficiaries have been the mine owners.
In other cases, the government offers direct subsidies, like those which have helped keep many renewable-energy projects afloat. Farmers, despite food prices at record highs, still get almost five billion dollars annually in direct payments, along with billions more in crop insurance and drought aid. U.S. sugar companies benefit from the sweetest boondoggle in business: an import quota keeps American sugar prices roughly twice as high as they otherwise would be, handing the industry guaranteed profits.
The tax code, too, is a useful tool for helping businesses. Domestic manufacturers collectively get a tax break of around twenty billion dollars a year. State and local governments give away seventy billion dollars annually in tax breaks and subsidies in order to lure (or keep) companies. The strategies make sense for local communities keen to generate new jobs, but, from a national perspective, since they usually just reward companies moving from one state to another, they’re simply giveaways.

Read more: Mitt Romney’s Leniency Toward Corporate Welfare Queens : The New Yorker

So Mitt Romney won the 2012 election? I'm not sure I follow how Mitt Romney has anything to do with your belief that Oil companies are subsidized by Government.

 

[asterism]

If Obama gets his budget as proposed, solar (and wind, etc) will get the "push" it needs...
at least $40 billion dollars taxed from oil and natural gas and pumped into alternatives/renewables.

If this shit can't survive in the marketplace, it has no "business" surviving at all.

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

What is that "welfare" exactly?

I know the spin but have never find anyone that can detail exactly what they are.

 

[Mr. H.]

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

No, they don't.

Mitt Romney’s Leniency Toward Corporate Welfare Queens : The New Yorker

CORPORATE WELFARE QUEENS

Mitt Romney once seemed like a moderate technocrat. But, as the Republican Convention and the video leak of his comments about the “forty-seven per cent” of Americans who “believe that they are victims” made clear, Romney now seems to fancy himself a small-government zealot, who promises the end of the culture of entitlement. Yet even as he assails people on Medicaid and Social Security, and those who receive the earned-income tax credit, for being “dependent upon government,” Romney has had strikingly little to say about another prominent group that’s “dependent upon government”: the many American companies whose profits rely, in one form or another, on government assistance.
From the days of high tariffs and giant land grants to the railroads, business and government have always been tightly intertwined in this country. But, in recent decades, what you could call the corporate welfare state has become bigger. Energy companies lease almost forty million acres of onshore land in the U.S. and more than forty million offshore, and keep the lion’s share of the profits from the oil and natural gas that they pump out. In theory, this is O.K., because we get paid for the leases and we get royalties on what they sell, but in practice it often works differently. In 1996, for instance, the government temporarily lowered royalties on oil pumped in the Gulf of Mexico as a way of encouraging more drilling at a time of low oil prices. But this royalty relief wasn’t rescinded when oil prices started to rise, which gave the oil companies a windfall of billions of dollars. Something similar happened in the telecom industry in the late nineties, when the government, in order to encourage the transition to high-def TV, simply gave local broadcasters swathes of the digital spectrum worth tens of billions of dollars. In the mining industry, meanwhile, thanks to a law that was passed in 1872 and never rewritten, companies can lease federal land for a mere five dollars an acre, and then keep all the gold, silver, or uranium they find; we, the people, get no royalty payments at all. Metal prices have soared in the last decade, but the only beneficiaries have been the mine owners.
In other cases, the government offers direct subsidies, like those which have helped keep many renewable-energy projects afloat. Farmers, despite food prices at record highs, still get almost five billion dollars annually in direct payments, along with billions more in crop insurance and drought aid. U.S. sugar companies benefit from the sweetest boondoggle in business: an import quota keeps American sugar prices roughly twice as high as they otherwise would be, handing the industry guaranteed profits.
The tax code, too, is a useful tool for helping businesses. Domestic manufacturers collectively get a tax break of around twenty billion dollars a year. State and local governments give away seventy billion dollars annually in tax breaks and subsidies in order to lure (or keep) companies. The strategies make sense for local communities keen to generate new jobs, but, from a national perspective, since they usually just reward companies moving from one state to another, they’re simply giveaways.

Read more: Mitt Romney’s Leniency Toward Corporate Welfare Queens : The New Yorker

The only reference to your spastic "oil company welfare" in this junk is an old contract dispute with the feds, and a manufacturing tax credit that is applied across a broad swath of industries.

Try a little harder next time, Junkbucket.

 

[Political Junky]

If Obama gets his budget as proposed, solar (and wind, etc) will get the "push" it needs...
at least $40 billion dollars taxed from oil and natural gas and pumped into alternatives/renewables.

If this shit can't survive in the marketplace, it has no "business" surviving at all.

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

What is that "welfare" exactly?

I know the spin but have never find anyone that can detail exactly what they are.

10 Most Profitable U.S. Corporations Paid Average Tax Rate Of Just 9 Percent Last Year: Report

10 Most Profitable U.S. Corporations Paid Average Tax Rate Of Just 9 Percent Last Year: Report
<excerpt>
According to the financial site NerdWallet, the 10 most profitable U.S. companies paid an average federal tax rate of just 9 percent last year. The group includes heavyweights Exxon Mobil, Apple, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase and General Electric. (Hat tip: Barry Ritholtz.)

 

[asterism]

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

What is that "welfare" exactly?

I know the spin but have never find anyone that can detail exactly what they are.

10 Most Profitable U.S. Corporations Paid Average Tax Rate Of Just 9 Percent Last Year: Report

10 Most Profitable U.S. Corporations Paid Average Tax Rate Of Just 9 Percent Last Year: Report
<excerpt>
According to the financial site NerdWallet, the 10 most profitable U.S. companies paid an average federal tax rate of just 9 percent last year. The group includes heavyweights Exxon Mobil, Apple, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase and General Electric. (Hat tip: Barry Ritholtz.)

So you don't know what the oil company subsidies are then.

If you have a problem with all the manipulation of the tax code by corporations you should advocate for tax reform, make it simpler and broader. But then you can't control industry through taxes so there's that.

 

[Mr. H.]

"Dirty" Solar?

Solar industry grapples with hazardous wastes - Yahoo! News

While solar is a far less polluting energy source than coal or natural gas, many panel makers are nevertheless grappling with a hazardous waste problem. Fueled partly by billions in government incentives, the industry is creating millions of solar panels each year and, in the process, millions of pounds of polluted sludge and contaminated water.

 

[whitehall]

Solar power: Is it time for the big push?

Jan. 31, 2013 — There are great expectations for solar power, especially in the coming years, when the International Energy Agency projects solar to grow faster than any other renewable power. But what does science need to do to more fully respond to the opportunities ahead?

Recently, three researchers discussed this with fellow scientist Harry A. Atwater, Jr., director of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Material Interactions in Solar Energy Conversion, as well as member of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) at the California Institute of Technology. To really give solar power a push, the scientists raised advancing how new materials are created, developed and brought to industry.
"We need to engage with manufacturers and end-users of the technology as soon as possible, rather than spend years doing lab demonstrations before anyone talks with industry," said Michael Wasielewski, director of the Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center and professor at Northwestern University. "We need to take advantage of manufacturers' expertise in how things are really done. On our part, we need to let them know about promising materials sooner, so they start to think about commercialization pathways earlier in the process."
<more>

"The big push"? You mean we haven't seen it yet?

 

[Mr. H.]

Solar power: Is it time for the big push?

Jan. 31, 2013 — There are great expectations for solar power, especially in the coming years, when the International Energy Agency projects solar to grow faster than any other renewable power. But what does science need to do to more fully respond to the opportunities ahead?

Recently, three researchers discussed this with fellow scientist Harry A. Atwater, Jr., director of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Material Interactions in Solar Energy Conversion, as well as member of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) at the California Institute of Technology. To really give solar power a push, the scientists raised advancing how new materials are created, developed and brought to industry.
"We need to engage with manufacturers and end-users of the technology as soon as possible, rather than spend years doing lab demonstrations before anyone talks with industry," said Michael Wasielewski, director of the Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center and professor at Northwestern University. "We need to take advantage of manufacturers' expertise in how things are really done. On our part, we need to let them know about promising materials sooner, so they start to think about commercialization pathways earlier in the process."
<more>

"The big push"? You mean we haven't seen it yet?

The big BIG push may come if Obama gets his budget as written. $40+ billion in oil and gas industry taxes that he's promised to plow into solar and other alternative/renewable techs.

 

[Againsheila]

“The US Energy Information Administration estimates the subsidy cost of wind runs at $23.50 [dollars per actual megawatt-hour] and solar burns through a bit more at $26.00. Natural gas and petroleum, 25 cents. Coal, 44 cents. “Clean” coal, refined to environmentalis’ standards, $29.81.”
Nickson, “Eco-Fascists,” p.123.

Don't know where they get their figures but you can take a clear plastic bottle, fill it with water, add two capfuls of bleach stick it in your ceiling so that 1/3 of it is above the ceiling and you have instant solar powered light. It's not pretty, but it works. Seems to me if it's that simple that they could come up with a low cost alternative that's not so tacky.

 

[newpolitics]

If Obama gets his budget as proposed, solar (and wind, etc) will get the "push" it needs...
at least $40 billion dollars taxed from oil and natural gas and pumped into alternatives/renewables.

If this shit can't survive in the marketplace, it has no "business" surviving at all.

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

What is that "welfare" exactly?

I know the spin but have never find anyone that can detail exactly what they are.

You are not aware that the oil industries are heavily subsidized by government? Hence, the used of quotations marks around the word "welfare," which it basically is, the irony being, the same people that support these subsidies are against any welfare for private citizens who actually need it.

 

[Mr. H.]

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

What is that "welfare" exactly?

I know the spin but have never find anyone that can detail exactly what they are.

You are not aware that the oil industries are heavily subsidized by government? Hence, the used of quotations marks around the word "welfare," which it basically is, the irony being, the same people that support these subsidies are against any welfare for private citizens who actually need it.

I've been in the business 35 years and that's news to me.
Fill us in on the poop.

 

[asterism]

Oil Companies get welfare from the government.

What is that "welfare" exactly?

I know the spin but have never find anyone that can detail exactly what they are.

You are not aware that the oil industries are heavily subsidized by government? Hence, the used of quotations marks around the word "welfare," which it basically is, the irony being, the same people that support these subsidies are against any welfare for private citizens who actually need it.

Then it should be easy for you to list those subsidies. Be specific.