Biden campaigns in Vegas

Last week, Vice President Joe Biden was in Las Vegas touting the need for green technology and the importance for government investment (taxation) in the fledgling industry. An industry that doesn’t rely on the free market but instead relies on tax payer funded subsidies. Alternative energy is on everyone’s radar with our “dependence” on foreign oil and the recent skyrocketing gas prices. Nevada is seen a possible testing ground for this technology, is it because of our abundance of sun and wind? Or could it be that over 80% of Nevada is “owned” by the federal government and since the fed spends so much on these green technologies it would be a logical place? It’s not because Nevada puts to use its natural resources, after all we don’t even keep the precious metals we are “allowed” to mine in our own state (but that’s a different story).
Nellis Air Force Base is running a solar farm and expects to save approximately $1 million a year on electricity. Before you jump to tout the success of the solar farm, it only supplies about 30% of the electrical needs of the base and cost $100 million. That means is would take 100 years for the investment to pay for itself and it would still require more electricity than the farm could supply. That does not sound like efficient alternative energy.
Other forms of alternative energy have the same needs; they need tax payer money to be economically viable and do not produce enough energy. While I will agree that this is important technology and should be researched and developed, I cannot agree with taking money from the American people to provide corporate welfare to some government favored businesses. How many of the great inventions and discoveries were made by the government? How many of those were created by government subsidies? Did Eli Whitney rely on government money to develop the cotton gin? Did Wilbur and Orville need the government to keep upstarts from trying to develop the airplane? The list could go on and on of society changing inventions that came about by a person and a vision. A vision of creating a better way to do something and the profits that comes along with it.
Nevada may have a leg up in the abundance of solar energy but it cannot become economically feasible until private industries take the lead in research and development. When the government, through tax payer money, is bankrolling your research there is no real incentive to develop new technology, you already have the money and if you develop the product you lose the funding. Free market competition is the only way to create new technology and the government has never created anything it didn’t first take from someone else.