I am a practicing engineer, with over 45 years in the design, development, and production of electric power-generating systems, including solar-powered systems. In my experienced judgment, solar farm technology is not an economical nor a technically viable energy source to power our American electric grid.
Our federal government and state governments have mandated the conversion of our current electric grid from being powered by fossil fuels to an alternate source of wind and solar energy (that is solar farms).
The American economy, America’s technical and manufacturing base requires a reliable, efficient power grid to support the largest, most complex and time-sensitive economy in the world. Solar Farms are not capable of meeting these requirements. Building our grid around solar farms will and is creating an unreliable and costly grid. Whether we all believe that there is a climate warming issue or not, destroying our current grid for the sake of implementing solar farm technology is not a solution.
This is why there is no real “emerging market” for solar farms in the United States. What has emerged is a well-funded government policy that props up solar farms by directing the federal agencies responsible for managing the national grid to decommission a significant portion of the current, functioning, fossil-fueled power plants in the next 7-15 years and replace them with unreliable “solar or wind energy.”
Those who advocate and push for the development of industrial solar utilities are utilizing tens of billions of dollars of government subsidies to replace America’s current high capacity, highly efficient (35-45% efficiency), highly reliable power grid with a diffused matrix of hundreds of low capacity, significantly inefficient (10-12% efficiency), unreliable solar farms.
This unacceptably low efficiency is why the developers of solar utilities need thousands of acres of prime farmland and need to install hundreds of thousands of solar panels to produce a mere few hundred MW of electrical power. Besides being inefficient, the solar panels only effectively function in the 6-7 hours occurring in the middle of the day.
The “Green Revolution” is not market-driven by real market economics. The fact is that if solar farms were a viable, competitive form of electric power generation and saved us money (as developers and politicians claim) we would not have to be compelled into accepting them by government mandate as reflected in the directives of several federal and state agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, EPA, Energy Information Agency, PJM, the OPSB, the Ohio Legislature and others.
Today we live in a very unstable, rapidly changing world and America is functioning on the political hysteria of climate change, wild government spending, and corporate greed. Open Road Renewables, out of Austin, Texas, is just one of many solar developers that is here in Ohio for only ONE reason: FOLLOWING THE MONEY.
Gary Koester, PhD
Mount Vernon, Ohio
