{"id":236,"date":"2012-11-11T13:21:49","date_gmt":"2012-11-11T13:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/?p=236"},"modified":"2012-11-11T13:24:43","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T13:24:43","slug":"suburban-sun-stroke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/?p=236","title":{"rendered":"Suburban Sun Stroke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don’t it always seem to go
\nThat you don’t know what you’ve got til it\u2019s gone
\nThey paved paradise
\nAnd put up a solar<\/strong> lot<\/p>\n

with apologies to Joni Mitchell<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the 20th<\/sup> century the Canal was repurposed as a splendid park and wildlife refuge. \u00a0In the borough of Princeton the Canal parallels Lake Carnegie, home of Princeton University\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Snapping turtles and painted turtles are common, and there are quite a few red-bellied cooters\u2014large high-backed turtles, quite rare in New Jersey, that like to bask on rocks along the Canal. \u00a0Like Painted Turtles, they are skittish; come too close and they disappear into the water.<\/p>\n

Natural areas like this are highly prized in New Jersey, the most urban state in the U.S.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Wealthy, environmentally correct communities like Princeton are particularly protective of their natural areas.\u00a0 There is not much open space left in the prosperous burgh.<\/p>\n

A thought experiment:\u00a0 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?\u00a0 The answer is obvious.\u00a0 They would freak out\u2014think of the risk to \u201cenvironmentally sensitive\u201d 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.\u00a0 But this would not placate Green Princetonians; a bitter fight would ensue.<\/p>\n

But what if, instead of an office complex, those 27 acres were covered with 16,500 photo-voltaic panels?\u00a0 No grass.\u00a0 No shrubs.\u00a0 No trees.\u00a0 Just lots and lots of silicon pointed skyward to catch the sun\u2019s rays 205 days a year (the other 140 are cloudy).<\/p>\n

No grass, no shrubs, no trees? \u2013 NO PROBLEM!<\/strong>\u00a0 This is solar power we are talking about, the savior of the planet, the ne plus ultra of the environmental gentry.\u00a0 Princeton University, which did indeed build this \u201csolar field\u201d (which looks more like a sprawling space telescope than a \u201cfield\u201d) bragged that the University \u201cwill 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.\u201d The true underlying economics are problematic at best.\u00a0 Unlike an office project, this solar field requires government and consumer subsidies<\/strong> to be financially attractive to the University. Thus the State of New Jersey effectively operates two antithetical initiatives: \u201cGreen Acres\u201d and \u201cSolar Acres.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, in the cramped confines of suburban New Jersey 27 acres is not a small piece of land.\u00a0 In fact it is nearly as large as Princeton University\u2019s beautiful main campus (from University Place to Washington Road, and from Nassau Street down to Dillon Gym).\u00a0 Which raises the question: How much of the University\u2019s electricity needs will actually be met by this big, ugly, intrusive, uneconomic, environmentally disruptive installation?\u00a0 Only 5.8%!\u00a0 The other 94.2% will still come from dreaded fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

There are lessons to be drawn.\u00a0 GEI (Green Energy Ideology) exerts a powerful grip on True Believers, such that they would destroy the environment in order to save it.\u00a0 Except that they won\u2019t 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.) \u00a0Another lesson is that, despite their frequent invocations of \u201cscience,\u201d greenies\u2019 standards for what is and is not environmentally correct are arbitrary, based as much on aesthetics as science.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

All this has not been lost on average citizens in Barrack Obama\u2019s vaunted \u201cmiddle class.\u201d\u00a0 They are fighting back.\u00a0 For details, see the website www.SmarterSolarNJ.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got til it\u2019s 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,51,50,53,49],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-delaware-raritan-canal","tag-environmental-regulation","tag-new-jersey-solar","tag-princeton-solar","tag-solar-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}