A tale of yet another billion-dollar solar-energy white elephant

If you're a leader of the Democrat party, or a communist, or anyone dedicated to destroying the United States, the beauty of the Deep State is that it will keep funding and praising stupid, ghastly, billion-dollar white elephant programs even if the Republicans manage to win the presidency.  Cuz once a white elephant has been built, any Republican president who scrapped it would be blasted by the Mainstream Media as "anti-science."

Or with the phrase "He's in the pocket of the fossil-fuel industry."

So...under the brilliant, honest, non-corrupt direction of Barack Obama--the administration that flushed half a billion taxpayer dollars on Solyndra-- the Department of Energy spent well over another billion in taxpayer dollars to fund a different solar energy company that has now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy without ever becoming fully operational.

The story of the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada is one of epic levels of government incompetence and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars.  The project initially got $737 million in guaranteed loans from the Obama administration, which included a settlement with the Department of Energy that left the American taxpayers liable for nearly $235 million in outstanding debt.

The stated goal of the project was to generate electricity from the sun even when the sun was hidden by  clouds, or at night, by melting sand, then using the stored heat to generating electricity.  The Department of Energy described it as “the first of its kind in the United States and the tallest molten salt tower in the world.”

Wow, the "tallest molten salt tower in the world"!

Commercial lenders weren't interested in loaning money for the project, so the Department of Energy effectively fully funded it.  The project got an additional $275.6 million from the Treasury Department in 2017.

Construction delays and equipment failures caused the project to miss its commercial start date. The plant had only one customer at the time, the utility company NV Energy, which told regulators that its most significant problem with the plant was its ability to meet baseline portfolio goals.

Despite its extensive problems, the Department of Energy continued to finance the plant and sing its praises, until the absolute last possible moment.

In April 2017, when the plant was in the midst of a months-long shutdown, the department wrote that it was a “milestone for the country’s energy future,” a “success story” that was taken (via taxpayer dollars) from “mirage to reality.”

Then last year the plant’s molten salt tanks experienced a catastrophic failure that rendered put the plant out of operation again.  Recently the plant's one customer terminated its contract with the plant. 

Fortunately, now that we have a pair of Democrats as presidents-elect, we can expect a lot more of these "groundbreaking" projects.  Cuz, SCIENCE, citizen.

Source.