If you are counting on solar power to solve California’s energy woes, you have spent too much time listening to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Energy Commission and too little time stocking up on candles.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama regularly praise renewable power and opinion polls show that Americans are generally enthusiastic about developing “green energy.” The turning blades of a wind turbine have been obligatory props for many of the candidates’ television ads. While wind is currently de rigueur, solar is not far behind.

Schwarzenegger’s fantasy, shared by bureaucrats at the Energy Commission, is that local roofs arrayed with photovoltaic panels will one day generate enough electricity to reduce the need to develop additional conventional power plants. Under both Democratic and Republican leadership, the Commission has for over 30 years doggedly opposed deployment of large-scale, conventional generating plants.

But power from rooftop solar panels cost 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt hour. By comparison, hydropower costs less than three cents per kilowatt hour. The unsubsidized cost of this energy source is 70.5 cents per kilowatt hour. A typical, two-kilowatt solar installation that could meet 20 percent of a home’s electrical demand costs about $20,000. Solar arrays large enough to carry 100 percent of a home’s energy needs cost around $100,000.

One does not have to be an academician to conclude that solar installations make no sense for the typical homeowner. Just the same, Professor Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley has determined that under the most generous analysis, the cost of installing a home solar device exceeds by 80 percent the value of the power it produces. “We are throwing money away by installing the current solar… technology, which is a loser,” he told Science Daily.

That brings us to why government subsidies for solar are so bad. Last week, the Assembly passed by a vote of 66-to-2 a bill introduced by Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, to extend a potentially huge property tax exemption for solar power installations. Presumably, none of the Republicans who voted for the bill were familiar with the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s studies on taxpayer subsidies for energy production. If they were, they would have known that the government subsidizes solar energy at the rate of $24.34 per megawatt hour. For perspective, the government subsidizes coal at 44 cents per megawatt hour, natural gas at 25 cents per megawatt hour, hydroelectric at about 67 cents per kilowatt hour and nuclear power at $1.59 per megawatt hour. Nuclear produces 20 percent of our electricity, coal 50 percent, natural gas 20 percent and hydro seven percent. Solar provides us with a negligible 0.01 percent.

This is no time to throw good money after bad by subsidizing solar installation. Electrical demand is rising fast, while supply is lagging. The wholesale cost of electricity has been climbing steadily since 2001. Our electricity use has risen 115 percent since the last national energy crisis in 1973.

Sacramentans will come to regret allowing the greenies to shut down the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station, which was capable of generating over 900 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 900,000 homes. And they should be even more chagrined that the facility was converted to solar power, which today ekes out a paltry four megawatts of electricity.
So you may think that you are saving the planet by installing solar panels or supporting development of solar energy plants. But you are really playing a bit part in the government’s latest energy subsidy scam.