Las Vegas City Wire

A new solar project in Las Vegas is providing daytime power to 13 MGM resorts in the city, the Las Vegas Sun reported. 

Chicago-based Invenergy, the company which operates most the of the solar farm, said it can produce enough energy to power 27,000 homes.

Invenergy operates and owns 25% of the solar farm, while American Electric Power owns the remainder, the company said in a June 28 press release. The 100-megawatt solar farm is expected to be operational for 35 years.

Robert Michaels, professor of economics at California State University, Fullerton, and an energy expert interviewed by the Las Vegas City Wire, said the Invenergy project and other solar projects have been able to operate due to federal and state subsidies.

"Well, think about how many subsidies and other breaks there are," Michaels said, noting that his remarks are his alone and not associated with Cal State Fullerton. "Both federal and in particular for you at the state level, and then you've got the basic requirements that utilities invest in these plants, so-called renewable portfolio standards, carve outs ... and then you've got the federal side, you've got the investment tax credit, you've got all of the other things, the accelerated depreciation. The point is I couldn't enumerate them all at once." 

A Harvard Business Review study found that the recent increase in solar energy projects has occurred largely because of government subsidies and tax credits, such as the solar investment tax credit, rather than the efficiency of solar. The solar investment tax credit currently covers the cost of 26% of solar-related expenses. 

"The thing is, there's no industry that gets anything remotely resembling the tax breaks that renewable power gets in places like Nevada, where you've got the underlying conditions for a thriving solar industry," Michaels said. "A large part of what's going on in there is people being able to pass this cost on to other people who basically aren't around to complain about it. In other words, the subsidies at the federal level are largely paid by people from other states."

However, past studies indicate that oil, gas and nuclear energy sources received substantial subsidies during developmental stages, as noted in this 2011 Chemical & Engineering news article which claims that "federal support during the first 15 years works out to $3.3 billion annually for nuclear energy and $1.8 billion annually for oil and gas, but an average of only $400 million a year in inflation-adjusted dollars for ­renewables."

Michaels said solar is not efficient in the long run and backup power is needed.

"Well, the easiest thing to do is to take a look at where the various power actually comes from," Michaels said. "What you have to do is you've got to remember if you've got a lot of renewables, like solar. Basically, when the sun goes down, they stop working at that point, you're going to have to have some sort of stopgap, namely plants that are high-cost plants are going to have to be built anyway in order to keep the lights on." 

"It's becoming harder and harder to find sources that can make up for the lost reliability," Michaels said. "Anybody who tells you that the plant will produce enough electricity to go with 3,000 homes or something like that, you should systematically assume that something is going on behind that. You've got to have a backup system, just looking at the cost of the renewable power plant alone is an understatement of the total bill that somebody is paying for."

When asked if he believes solar farms are as clean and efficient, Michaels said, "They are, but what do you get for the money — you basically get power that's unreliable, all the gaps that have to be filled in. And that's the part of the total cost of any power that comes from solar plants, you can't get around the fact that something's got to be done to keep the lights on.

"In places like California, essentially, they've been able to give breaks to the solar and wind industries because they're able to fold some of the extra costs into California customers' bills. And California is able to get some power from elsewhere in the West at what are still fairly reasonable terms. These sources are vanishing as renewables become a bigger part of the total productive equipment of the utility industry in each of the states and in the West as a whole." 

The result of other sources of energy disappearing will result in higher rates.

"What's going to happen is that people are going to have to hustle to get whatever there is and to basically just patch up the system enough to make it operate dependably and probably to change the rates the different types of users are paying in order to shift part of the burden to where it would be politically acceptable, as opposed to, say, small residential customers with no alternatives," he said.

Michaels does not believe solar farms are as reliable as some believe. 

"I have no problem with solar farms as long as the people who own them should be responsible for delivering reliable power and bearing the cost of it," he said. "Well, think about it this way. A solar plant — most power systems where you had all fossil fuel with similar plants, basically if you added an extra plant to the system. You increased its reliability because there were more in the way of emergency alternatives in the case where you've got the build of the renewable power plants, the renewables decrease reliability. Because they'll simply go out when the sun goes down. So how do you get around it? You got to stick somebody else with the build for that reliability. And tremendous amount of what's going on all over the West and all over the country is trying to make believe this, hoping that you can figure out how to make somebody else pay the bills for."

Weighing in on the Invenergy project, Michaels said, "I would like to say something, though, about all of the issues in the MGM Grand. Well, you could keep the lights on where you could power enough in the way of buildings in order that that would be OK. The problem is the solar power is not going to be the source of all that power — somewhere else in the West that power has got to be coming from. We used to be able to do things like the Pacific Northwest with all the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. They've always had spare power that they could sell at rates that were acceptable to Californians in the balance and on the other hand, kept them whole as well. Those days are gone or they're going real fast.

"For the longest time, Nevada has been able to lean on other states that have temporary surplus generation capacity. And the situation is becoming more urgent as solar and wind become a larger and larger part of Nevada's sources."

In addition, solar panels produce 300 times more toxic waste than the high-level waste produced from nuclear power plants, a Forbes columnist stated.

The Harvard Business Review study found that solar panel waste will end up making solar energy four times more expensive than initially assumed. 

"By 2035 discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times,” the study stated. “... If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than (International Renewable Energy Agency) IRENA anticipates.”