Surprise! Navy Wastes Stimulus Money On Green Energy Boondoggle

Unsurprisingly, the Time magazine article by Mark Thompson takes a negative view of the Navy and how they waste money, while failing to take the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ie, Stimulus, Porkulus) to task

Washington was buzzing last week with the news that Solyndra LLC, a California solar-energy firm with ties to the Obama White House, had gone belly up – after pocketing a half-billion loan from the federal government. Seems the Navy also has been suffering from fiscal sunstroke, to judge from a just-released Pentagon inspector general probe.

It’s the oldest story in government: when there’s pressure to spend money, it will be spent, and not always wisely. The Navy, and other services, have been under pressure from the Obama Administration and Congress to try to jump-start the moribund economy by pumping funds into various projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – otherwise known as the stimulus. The IG report looked into the Navy’s funding of several photovoltaic – PV – projects, designed to turn sunshine into electricity.

And you know what they found out?

During project planning and selection, officials did not consider whether projects were cost-effective or analyze different types of energy projects to determine the best investments for meeting legislative energy goals. Instead, they relied upon project titles, location, cost, and amount of time to award contracts to select projects. Officials incorrectly concluded that cost effectiveness was not required for planning Recovery Act energy projects.

Mark goes on, whining about the military being a “state-operated monopoly”,  (and whines some more about the military at the end) without mentioning the other state run monopolies, or the other waste in the Recovery Act, and we get

…the Navy and Marine Corps did not have processes for completing life-cycle cost analyses, processes for planning and selecting all energy projects, or energy strategies for achieving legislative goals. As a result, the Department of the Navy will not recover $25.1 million of the $50.8 million invested in PV projects

So, another $25.1 million wasted on a “green” project, because there was no need for cost effectiveness in the Recovery Act. Might not seem like much money in Washington, but, out in the real world, that’s a nice chunk of change.

Fortunately, the DOE is about to waste another $105 million in “loans” for a cellulosic ethanol company, which will make ethanol from corn waste. I’m sure that at no time did the thought “hey, corn based ethanol drives up the price of food, it uses lots of water to make, it provides little power, it isn’t really good for auto engines, and it puts out more greenhouse gases than oil, oh, and it is a waste of money” never crossed the minds of those at the DOE.

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6 Responses to “Surprise! Navy Wastes Stimulus Money On Green Energy Boondoggle”

  1. captainfish says:

    Don’t forget the $0.5 Trillion dollars given to the Solar City company to install solar panels across the US at military sites.

    I’m sorry, is that favoritism? You get an IG report that cites the military did not look at cost-effectiveness in awarding grants to alternative energy projects….. and they 10x down by giving $0.5 Trillion to a single company.

    Google is also investing in this company:

    California-based Google will also make a return on capital upfront, he said, since its investment is supported by the Treasury Department’s cash grants program.

    As an alternative to tax credits, the program reimburses investors for 30 percent of project expenditures for solar. The program was created after the 2008 financial crisis to revive spending on clean energy.

    Ummm.. how can giving tax dollars away hand over foot “revive spending” following the 2008 financial crisis and continuing now during the second Great Depression!?!??

  2. captainfish says:

    My Bad… $1 Billion

  3. You must be a raaaaacist for being against the President’s green energy boondogle.

  4. captainfish says:

    green energy boondogle.

    You might be a racist if…. You said it first.

  5. It’s like we’re against…..greeeeeen people.

  6. captainfish says:

    One wonders, will the liberals and greenies and AGW’rs kick the alien visitors off our planet for wasting valuable alien resources and using their ships to pollute our atmosphere.

    hey there now… why haven’t we looked at the affect UFO’s engines have on our atmosphere? Those things can’t be zero emission!! I mean, they are inter-dimensional. Those things have to gobble up valuable energy and pollute like crazy. They can’t run off of CFL bulbs.

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