During the 2000s, Steve Milloy’s Free Enterprise Action Fund repeatedly told GE CEO Jeff Immelt that expensive green energy technology was a loser.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
General Electric Co. GE -0.86% is abandoning plans to manufacture solar panels amid a market glut and sold the technology it has built up over the last half decade to First Solar Inc. FSLR -2.37%
Meanwhile, First Solar reported a 70% drop in profit and cut its forecast for the year as two large sales were delayed, sending its shares sharply lower in late trading on Tuesday.
The two developments were sour notes for a renewable-power business that continues to be pressured by weak solar-panel prices and overcapacity.
FLASHBACK: Letter to GE shareholders from Free Enterprise Action Fund (March 17, 2006).
GE’s decision to exit the solar panel business is even more significant considering Immelt’s somewhat cozy relationship with Obama. But then the bottom line with GE has always been the bottom line.
Even with “renewable standards”, subsidies and other rents, solar is a losing proposition. How much faster would these wasteful projects be abandoned without rents? Or, better yet, how much faster would their believers find the practical and economically valuable methods to use them?