Fisker is the Second Shoe to Drop

A story on Delaware Online today (sorry, I refuse to subscribe to the death of another tree in order to boost News Journal sales so I am not sure if it was actually printed in the paper version) displays the folly of American green energy policy.  Just a month after Blue Water Wind failed and cost us untold millions of dollars and just over a month after Fisker announced that their car faced similar battery problems as the Chevy Volt, the embattled car company, who has pushed back their production dates more than 2 years, has laid off 25 workers and cut contracts with a number of subcontractors.  Fisker has been touted as the next big thing to prove that the government's green energy strategy works.  Yet from it's inception it has needed massive government subsidies and government assistance in the form of sweetheart land deals to stay afloat.  After promising Delaware's largely union autoworkers big payouts if they could just hold on through the retooling of the former GM plant, the company has all but dashed those hopes.  Thousands of Delaware autoworkers who have been home after being laid off by GM and Chrysler and waiting for Fisker to start up now have little hope for a return to automobile manufacturing in Delaware.

On this blog back in September, we talked about Delaware's Solyndra lesson.  We pointed out the problems with Fisker's numbers and we referenced a number of other articles that had similar concerns.  The bottom line, many of us saw this coming but the government ignored us at best and made fun of us at worst.  They called us crazy and yet here you can see the results of government attempting to pick winners and losers.  In the end the taxpayers lose when their money is taken and wasted, the employees lose when they end up out of work and the communities lose when businesses close their doors and the ancillary jobs leave town. 

Mark this date.  In December of 2011, I gave a talk at a meeting of concerned citizens where we covered a range of topics including green energy, fracking and the cost of our government's green waste.  You can see the presentation from that meeting here.  The next green energy disaster to rock Delaware will be Bloom Energy who is relying on Delmarva Power to subsidize its Bloom Boxes by tacking on a $2-$4 charge to each bill.  Government cannot and should not pick winners and losers.  This is yet another reason why we simply MUST put people who understand our markets and the design of our government in the places currently occupied by corrupt officials more interested in cronyism than their constituents.