Saturday, September 06, 2014

Elon Musk, Tax-Sucker Extraordinaire

If you don't get the term "crony capitalist" yet, perhaps this story will help.

....the nasty little secret about renewables is that the sun doesn’t shine enough to make any power 70% of the time and the winds tend to blow in the spring and fall, which are periods of low energy demand. Furthermore, sometimes the wind blows and sometime the sun shines. 
 
This intermittence requires utilities to pay very high fees under the Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act to provide “Qualifying Facilities” stand-by carbon based power plants that are available to be quickly cranked-up to maintain the power to their electric grids on a 24/7 basis. 

The California Public Utilities Commission regulation allows full pass-through percentage markup on all purchased utility costs in the state. Consequently, it is more advantageous for utilities to pay higher costs to buy power. This explains why utilities are so enthusiastic to pay the high subsidized cost of “sustainably” generated power.

Since battery power has been politically deemed to be “sustainable power”, SolarCity and Tesla intend to manufacture huge “battery farms” in states like California that can be recharged at low electrical rates and then receive fees from utilities as stand-by power sources, regardless if the battery power is ever used. 
Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX are headquartered in California. As CEO, Elon Musk successfully led lobbying for each of these companies to receive huge amounts of government subsidies from the state. Having proved that he is the best CEO at getting subsidies from California taxpayers, Elon Musk seems to have chosen to switch where he is building his new factory to Nevada in order to avoid being a taxpayer.

If you STILL don't get it, please:  do not vote in any elections.  Ever.

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