Stay connected!
Our FREE newsletters provide a daily roundup of the morning’s top headlines. Subscribe today!
Our FREE newsletters provide a daily roundup of the morning’s top headlines. Subscribe today!
Karen spent most of her career reporting for the Kansas City Star, focusing at various times on local and regional news, and features. More recently, she was employed as a researcher and writer for a bioethics center at a children’s hospital in Kansas City. Karen covers Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.
More by Karen UhlenhuthComments are closed.
Let me ask a question. Is the Winnebago Tribe asking me, who pays taxes and gets no benefit from their folly, to pay for half of their “investment’?
I’m not sure that is fair and maybe legal in the context of what they are doing. If they are so convinced that solar is their solution, well be it. But let them come up with the $350,000 to do it. Solar will NOT provide all their electricity needs and is a burden on the reliable, steady, concentrated power from gas and nuclear as they have to ramp up and down to accommodate solar instability. That is very inefficient.
You might want to do some research on the facts before you taste your own shoe leather. First of all while the Tribe got a grant from the DOE, they do not qualify for other incentives that most rural Americans also have at their disposal like a 30% tax credit, 25% USDA grants and loan guarantees, depreciation, energy credits, etc. The government provides these incentives because it is in the national interest and ‘traditional’ energy companies have an established place at the government trough.
Secondly, the systems installed were all offsetting retail power and impact the grid in much the same way that conservation (also subsidized) does. These system are too small to impact big plants, but they do produce power during peak times in the Summer when the system strains to meet demand.
Darn those pesky facts!