Dear Editor,
I’m writing in response to Sarah Stock’s recent letter to the editor (“Don’t prop up a dying industry,” Feb. 11-17, 2016, Moab Sun News).
Try as they might, alternative energy projects will never be profitable without using massive amounts of public money to prop up their business models. With high photovoltaic prices, expensive inverters and battery storage (lead, etc.), and a very chaotic political climate, the average citizen is finding it nearly impossible to live off the grid in any meaningful way.
The alternative energy industry has squandered millions of dollars of borrowed public money – ours, yours and mine? – and spent it on energy projects that have yet to live up to the promises made in order to gain the public subsidies that these failing companies needed, i.e. Solyndra. Right now, we need to challenge all of these failing projects. We need our money to go toward realistic private energy projects that don’t require massive transfusions of government subsidies in order to even exist, and not waste it on a speculative industry that is incapable of self-sustaining operation, a socialistic, crony capitalistic, government-supported industry that, beyond imagination, will not in the long run make even a 2 percent change in the quality of our environment. Socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money.
By the way, I love my solar/ wind system. It works great for its purpose and nobody else had to pay for it.
Thank you, with tongue in cheek and perhaps foot in mouth (in the Moab environs at least).
