Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a solar lot
with apologies to Joni Mitchell
In the booming 1830s Irish laborers used picks, shovels, wheel barrows and mule-powered carts to dig a 66-mile ditch connecting Pennsylvania with New York City. In its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s the Delaware and Raritan Canal was used to ship millions of tons of anthracite coal across New Jersey, from the Delaware Valley to New York. In the 20th century the Canal was repurposed as a splendid park and wildlife refuge. In the borough of Princeton the Canal parallels Lake Carnegie, home of Princeton University’s crew teams. If you walk the tow path that runs along the Canal and Lake you will see plenty of ducks and hawks and an occasional blue heron. Snapping turtles and painted turtles are common, and there are quite a few red-bellied cooters—large high-backed turtles, quite rare in New Jersey, that like to bask on rocks along the Canal. Like Painted Turtles, they are skittish; come too close and they disappear into the water.
Natural areas like this are highly prized in New Jersey, the most urban state in the U.S. Indeed, the state government spends millions of dollars annually on its Green Acres Program to buy acreage before it is gobbled up by developers of houses and office buildings. Wealthy, environmentally correct communities like Princeton are particularly protective of their natural areas. There is not much open space left in the prosperous burgh.
A thought experiment: How would the good citizens of Princeton react if a developer proposed to build a 27-acre office complex on open fields located right next to the D&R Canal and Lake Carnegie? The answer is obvious. They would freak out—think of the risk to “environmentally sensitive” wetlands; the threat to wildlife; the traffic, noise, pollution, and congestion. The developer would try to meet these objections with detailed projections of new jobs created and tax revenue generated. He would commission an environmental impact assessment and promise that every effort would be made to preserve the natural character of the land–plenty of grass and trees and shrubs and maybe a pond. But this would not placate Green Princetonians; a bitter fight would ensue.
But what if, instead of an office complex, those 27 acres were covered with 16,500 photo-voltaic panels? No grass. No shrubs. No trees. Just lots and lots of silicon pointed skyward to catch the sun’s rays 205 days a year (the other 140 are cloudy).
No grass, no shrubs, no trees? – NO PROBLEM! This is solar power we are talking about, the savior of the planet, the ne plus ultra of the environmental gentry. Princeton University, which did indeed build this “solar field” (which looks more like a sprawling space telescope than a “field”) bragged that the University “will become a leader in American higher education in solar energy when it installs a 5.3-megawatt solar collector field on 27 acres it owns in West Windsor Township. . . . The project eventually will reduce the University’s carbon footprint by decreasing its dependence on fossil fuels and should trim approximately 8 percent per year from its electric costs.” The true underlying economics are problematic at best. Unlike an office project, this solar field requires government and consumer subsidies to be financially attractive to the University. Thus the State of New Jersey effectively operates two antithetical initiatives: “Green Acres” and “Solar Acres.”
Now, in the cramped confines of suburban New Jersey 27 acres is not a small piece of land. In fact it is nearly as large as Princeton University’s beautiful main campus (from University Place to Washington Road, and from Nassau Street down to Dillon Gym). Which raises the question: How much of the University’s electricity needs will actually be met by this big, ugly, intrusive, uneconomic, environmentally disruptive installation? Only 5.8%! The other 94.2% will still come from dreaded fossil fuels.
There are lessons to be drawn. GEI (Green Energy Ideology) exerts a powerful grip on True Believers, such that they would destroy the environment in order to save it. Except that they won’t save it, because trivial reductions in greenhouse gasses from this and similar projects will be overwhelmed by the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in emerging markets. (I have done the arithmetic but will not discuss it here.) Another lesson is that, despite their frequent invocations of “science,” greenies’ standards for what is and is not environmentally correct are arbitrary, based as much on aesthetics as science. Thus while this 27-acre monstrosity makes the cut, far smaller, less intrusive natural gas wells producing clean fuel, lower energy costs, and thousands of high-paying blue collar jobs are rejected.
All this has not been lost on average citizens in Barrack Obama’s vaunted “middle class.” They are fighting back. For details, see the website www.SmarterSolarNJ.com.
