Biden’s Green New Scam Is Alive And Well – A Case Study In Pennsylvania

Clifford Township is in rural northeast Pennsylvania near the New York line. Winters here are long and Spring and Fall are full of overcast days. Clifford also sits right on top of the Marcellus Shale making it part of Pennsylvania’s natural gas heartland. This is, in short one, of the last places on the planet anyone would build a solar farm.

Yet, they are, and you are paying for it.

Susquehanna Solar proposes to build a 185-acre solar farm in Clifford Township between State Routes 106 and 2014. The land was up until fairly recently a farm raising American Bison. If Susquehanna Solar gets its way, the land will soon be covered in solar panels.

Susquehanna Solar is just one of the companies building solar farms all across Pennsylvania. Even as President Trump exhorts the fossil fuel industry to “drill baby drill” and talks of Biden’s “Green New Scam,” the provisions of this scam, officially called the Inflation Reduction Act, remain in place. The federal government continues to push economically non-viable “green” energy projects nationwide.

How does this work? The federal government gives companies building these solar farms a 30% federal tax credit. So, a 100-million-dollar project gets you a $30 million tax credit. This at a time when the federal government is already running a budget deficit so massive it is now threatening the economic stability of the republic.

The companies building these farms also get to depreciate their expenditures over only five years. That means the tax write-offs are even bigger.

The Inflation Reduction Act that makes all this possible was pushed through under Biden with virtually no Republican support. Its express purpose was to completely transform our economy, kill off fossil fuels and usher in a new era of “green energy.” It did not matter that the technologies being pushed were not economically viable. The revolutionaries of the Biden administration pushed it through anyway.

And, of course, it provided massive opportunities for corporate welfare and fraud. Overall, while Elon and DOGE are still trying to get a handle on the waste involved, it appears somewhere between $1 trillion and $4 trillion went out the door to pay for “green” energy that can never compete with coal, nuclear and natural gas.

The economics are straightforward. “A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate,” says the Department of Energy, while “wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.”

Similarly, a 2021 report from Bloomberg News reports that a “200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 19 square miles” while a “natural gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.”

In short, it is madness to believe that solar farms can compete with the massive natural gas reserves sitting right under Clifford Township. You don’t have to guess that. Take a look at the Ivanpah Solar Plant in California, and you will see the future of all these facilities.

Eleven years ago, the massive Ivanpah solar farm opened in the Mojave Desert. Now it is about to close. Along the way - according to environmentalists - the farm killed thousands of birds and tortoises.

The plant’s mirrors ignited birds in flight.

The Ivanpah solar facility is located on five square miles of land. It was touted when it opened as a representing a breakthrough in clean energy. No one thinks that anymore. Not even the environmentalists.

“The Ivanpah plant was a financial boondoggle and environmental disaster,” Julia Dowell of the Sierra Club said in an email.

“Along with killing thousands of birds and tortoises, the project’s construction destroyed irreplaceable pristine desert habitat along with numerous rare plant species,” Dowell said.

There were other problems. Despite what the builders claimed, the sun did not actually shine as much as they predicted. The farm produced too little energy. This is in the desert, not the often foggy mountains of Pennsylvania.

This comes down to physics. Solar panels only convert 6-20% of the energy they absorb into electricity. The rest is converted to heat.

Solar panels are also, by the way, very bad for the environment.

They are made using toxic chemicals such as Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic, Hexafluoroethane, and Polyvinyl fluoride. Some panels release Nitrogen trifluoride which is magnitudes worse for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Disposing of all this waste is a big problem. Only about 10% of solar panels are recycled. It is estimated that 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life by 2050. No one has a plan for how to safely dispose of them.

Ivanpah is not the only “green” company going belly up. Sunnova Energy, a huge solar panel company based in Texas, just filed for bankruptcy. They can’t sell solar panels, because consumers have absorbed the fact that they are a waste of money. Sunnova was given a 3 billion dollar loan by the Biden administration. That’s your money, and the truth is it will likely never be repaid.

Sunnova generated $2 million in Q4 of 2024 when it had forecast a surplus of $104 million. Sunnova is $8.3 billion in debt.

Donald Trump is in the White House. His agenda is crystal clear. He wants to knock off all the nonsense about supposed climate change and turbo-charge the American fossil fuel industry. Up in Pennsylvania, they didn’t get the memo. The “Green New Scam” is alive and well.