Vin Suprynowicz

Nevada, widely acknowledged to be “Ground Zero” of the Great Recession, needs both cheap and plentiful electricity, and jobs.

President Obama has acknowledged, more than once, that the great historic generator of jobs and sustainable wealth in this country has always been the private sector.

Private investors have already rendered a judgment on the productive “jobs and energy” investment they’re willing to make in Nevada. Since it penciled out as likely to produce reasonable profits, the private sector was willing to build — at the investors’ own risk, without any massive government subsidies — cleaner-burning, coal-fired power plants in Ely, some 200 miles north of Las Vegas.

But despite the fact coal is cheap and we have enough to last for centuries, reducing our dependence on “foreign oil,” U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and others in Washington saw to it no permits could issue for that perfectly legal enterprise, which promised to provide construction jobs, permanent jobs, and the plentiful cheap power Nevada’s other entrepreneurs need to keep their doors open and their businesses growing, all within rigorous new EPA air quality standards.

Why? Washington thinks it can pick and choose which “alternative energy” technologies will succeed in the future. So it borrows 40 percent of current spending at interest, makes up the rest by printing money out of thin air (thus harming any American who has saved and invested, by devaluing the dollar) and plows money into allegedly “green” technologies under the guidance of its big campaign donors and bundlers.

(See Steven J. Spinner, half-million-dollar Obama fund-raiser who became one of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s key advisors on this “green” loan program while his wife’s law firm represented companies applying for such loans, according to ABC.)

Wednesday, the Energy Department approved two more loan guarantees worth more than $1 billion for solar energy projects in Nevada and Arizona, two days before the expiration date of a boondoggle loan program that has already prompted congressional inquiries, and may yet enter the history books alongside the Teapot Dome and Billy Sol Estes’ empty tanks of Texas soybean oil.

Energy Secretary Chu, who some speculate may be asked to fall on his sword over the Solyndra scandal, said this week the department has completed a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110 megawatt solar tower on federal land near Tonopah, Nev., and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150 megawatt solar plant near Phoenix.

The loans were approved under the same program that handed a $528 million direct government loan to Solyndra Inc., the California solar panel maker that went bankrupt after receiving that taxpayer money, laying off its 1,100 workers. Watchdogs inside the government had warned the Obama administration that Solyndra — owned in large part by major Obama campaign donor George Kaiser — had never made a dime in real profits, and that its solar panel designs could never be sold for a profit on the market. Solyndra is under investigation by the FBI and is the focal point of House hearings.

Secretary Chu said the Nevada project would produce enough electricity to power more than 43,000 homes, while the Arizona project would power nearly 31,000 homes. The two projects will create about 900 construction jobs and at least 52 permanent jobs, Chu said.

Do the math. That’s $20 million per “permanent” job — assuming these projects and jobs prove any more “permanent” than Solyndra — to provide perhaps 5 percent of the energy needs of a city like Las Vegas.

And solar panel arrays produce power only 12 hours per day when the sun shines. The physics of distribution system “loading” — assuming “green” lawsuits ever allow the necessary distribution lines to be built — mean each solar farm has to be backed up with a traditional, quick-starting fossil-fuel generating station to mirror its power output through the night. How “green” is that?

“If we want to be a player in the global clean energy race, we must continue to invest in innovative technologies that enable commercial-scale deployment of clean, renewable power like solar,” Secretary Chu said in a statement.

But taxpayers will receive no “dividend checks” for this “investment.” Listen for misleading metaphors about how our “dividends will come from knowing we’ve promoted green power to save the earth,” blah blah blah.

In the real world, Washington can only shift money away from the kinds of ventures private risk-takers would happily fund — like coal-fired plants in Ely — to more politically favored alternatives, just as two centuries ago it disastrously subsidized the inefficient steamboat line of Edward K. Collins that proved unable to compete with the more efficient, privately funded enterprises of Cornelius Vanderbilt (when the subsidies ended, Collins sank), just as a century later the government lavishly subsidized rubber-band aeronaut Samuel Langley, who gave up after his first two manned planes crashed into the Potomac at takeoff, while a few hundred miles away in the same month two frugal Dayton bicycle mechanics with $2,000 in private capital were making history at Kitty Hawk.

Senate Majority Leader Reid is a strong supporter of the Nevada solar project, backed by an energy investment fund where House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law Ronald is second in command, per the London Daily Mail. Mr. Reid says this latest massive dollop of pork will help his state’s economy recover.

We must all hope so. But was Sen. Reid elected based on his expertise in penciling out profitable power plant investments? How much of his own private capital has he put at risk? Will he go broke if these new solar farms end up like Solyndra? Non-subsidized investors are far less likely to shrug off disaster, saying “Oh well, that was yesterday.”

These latest loan approvals came just two days before the “renewable energy” loan program approved under the 2009 economic porkulus law is set to expire. At least seven projects worth more than $5 billion are still pending.

“Candidly, it might be time for the federal government to rethink the whole idea of loan programs,” says Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, the Washington-based advocacy group. Schatz called the government’s track record on such loans to date “lousy.”