Surprises Galore at Clean Energy Summit

Surprises ruled the day at the National Clean Energy Summit, held September 7 in Las Vegas. The Summit, coordinated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and the leftist advocacy group Center for American Progress, featured surprise appearances by SUVs, environmental protesters, praise for hydropower, and a dreary, steady rain as speaker after speaker sang the praises of solar power.

As the Summit kicked off at 9:00 in the morning, approximately 50 environmental activists gathered in protest outside the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Thomas & Mack Center. Wearing t-shirts and carrying posters castigating coal and praising solar power, somebody forgot to tell the protesters that the Summit speakers actually agreed with them. Somebody also forgot to tell God or Mother Nature (take your pick) not to send a steady, gloomy rain to interrupt a solar power cheerleading session in the Mojave Desert. As the rain scattered the protesters before they could finish expressing their indignation about the lack of solar power, the National Clean Energy Summit would have been thrust into darkness if Nevada Energy or UNLV were following the protesters’ pro-solar advice.

Shortly before the rain hit, Harry Reid rushed out to assure the protesters that they and he were on the same team. Unable or unwilling to traverse the 100 yards of relatively empty parking lot between the Thomas & Mack Center and the protest on the sidewalk along Swenson Street, a caravan of gas-guzzling SUVs pulled up to the Mack Center to whisk Reid and a few aides to the protest. (Somebody must have Bogarted all the Priuses from the McCarron Airport Hertz station before Reid’s jet arrived from Washington.)

With the rabble finally mollified and dispersed, Reid hopped back into one of the SUVs in the caravan and made the lengthy 100-yard commute back to the Thomas & Mack Center. Inside, Reid praised the clean, renewable power provided by the Hoover Dam. To an audience of roughly 500 attendees, Reid said Las Vegas as we know it would not be possible without such a wonderful hydroelectric project. I quickly found a south-facing window to see if the Sierra Club activists were reassembling after Reid’s endorsement of one of their mortal enemy power sources, but apparently the Sierra Club and their fellow environmental activists had already taken Reid at his prior word and had completely dispersed.

Strolling among the exhibitor booths during a break, I came across a very pleasant, genuinely likeable fellow representing a solar power producer. The solar representative enthusiastically showed me literature for a solar power project being built in the Mojave Desert. I acknowledged that one can produce solar power less expensively in the Mojave Desert than anywhere else in the nation, and asked him if his company could produce solar power that was cost-competitive with coal, nuclear, or natural gas.

“Oh, we’re expensive,” the rep admitted, “but we just received a $2 billion grant from the federal government. We hope to be cost-competitive in a decade or so.”

This sounded an awful lot like, “We just received $2 billion last night from the tooth fairy. If we keep losing teeth at this pace, we might be able to turn a profit in a decade or so.”

After the break, speaker after speaker – including T. Boone Pickens, Center for American Progress CEO John Podesta, and Pacific Gas & Electric CEO Peter Darbee – spoke in broad terms and meaningless platitudes about the promise of renewable power. Nobody presented economic cost comparisons, nobody mentioned the billions of taxpayer dollars already being handed over to the renewable power industry every year, and nobody pointed out that T. Boone Pickens, PG&E, and the Center for American Progress all are in bed with the renewable power industry and have glaring conflicts of interest regarding renewable power issues.

As each successive speaker preached to the environmental choir but offered no economically viable plan of action, the legacy press in attendance fawned over Reid and laughed loudly at various weak jokes about the proponents of conventional energy.

For a more in-depth, can’t miss article about how I infiltrated the environmental activist protest outside the Clean Energy Summit, check back here on Monday.