Saturday’s New York Times brought a remarkable story confirming my worst fears about the excesses of government efforts to encourage clean energy projects. The excellent work by Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss focused on NRG’s California Valley Solar Ranch project. With help from Booz and Company, the terrific graphic that accompanied the story showed that NRG received vast subsidies in a variety of forms: loans, grants, tax goodies and requirements that utilities buy the power at higher prices. All told, the largesse covered $1.4 billion of the $1.6 billion cost of the project. Not only will NRG make a handsome profit, but an extraordinary amount of Americans’ money will have been wasted in this vast oversubsidization.
