Crescent Dunes is the most recent failure in a long line of enormous and expensive government projects. Crescent Dunes was a $1 billion solar facility proposed in 2011 by SolarReserve Inc. Democrats leaped at the chance to support the renewable energy project and show just how smart and forward-thinking they were.
At the time, the Department of Energy Secretary Stephen Chu offered SolarReserve government loan guarantees and the project was allowed to be built on public land in Nevada due to Democratic support. The solar farm was intended to provide enough power for a city of 100,000 people, but the reality is far different than what was planned. By the time the project was finished, it cost Nevada $135 per megawatt-hour, while other solar farms cost a fraction of that at $30 per megawatt-hour.
The technology used to build Crescent Dunes was obsolete before the facility ever opened. It was a casualty of rapidly advancing technology and government-subsidized inefficiency. Democrats have proven far too willing to throw money at unreasonable projects in the past such as Solyndra LLC, a solar company with $535 million in loan guarantees that went bankrupt in 2011. Crescent Dunes has proven that these “forward-thinking” Democrats are actually incredibly short-sighted and wasteful.
Now, the taxpayers are responsible for $737 million in government loan guarantees and SolarReserve is being sued left and right for mismanagement. SolarReserve Cofounder Bill Gould is all too eager to blame the failure of his company on the contractor ACS Cobra, despite the fact that SolarReserve has brought no legal action against the contractor.
Once ardent supporters of the project, politicians, investors, and even the SolarReserve executives have been desperate to distance themselves from the Crescent Dunes disaster before it can drag them and their careers down. Democrats dream up these absurd and unrealistic plans, like the Green New Deal, but when things inevitably begin to turn for the worse they are nowhere to be found. They seem incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions.
Massive government projects are an unimaginable waste of taxpayer money. Government employees and elected officials—who rarely have any idea what they are talking about—spend other people’s money to support their own policy agendas. Nonetheless, Democrats remain committed to repeating their own history of failure.
