Please read this week’s guest post by Lindsay Leveen of the blog Greenexplored.com. Lindsay is a chemical engineer and has been an opponent of Bloom Energy based on the science, or lack of it when the decision was made to give Bloom a favorable deal in 2011 which grants it over $1.1 billion over 21 years for its fuel cell technology. A recent decision by a judge to grant standing to a Bloom Energy competitor gives hope future decisions, if not on Bloom, will be made on sound science and not on cronyism:
I have been wondering why DELMARVA Power entered into the deal to act as Bloom’s agent in the BLOOMDOGGLE of DELMARVA’s customers in Delaware???
I have blogged about the fraudulent overcharge for excess natural gas above the permitted maximum quantity in generating “unbetter” electrons from the Bloom coffins in the coastal zone of the first state. DELMARVA is a party to this crime. But why would a large utility become entangled in a BLOOMDOGGLE of major greenwashing and financial fraud proportions?
We have to go back a few years. The government of the first state wanted greener energy in Delaware and had dictated that DELMARVA should enter into power purchase agreements for wind and solar generated power. Of particular interest is a project called Blue Water Wind that was intended to supply 200 megawatts of offshore wind power to DELMARVA under an executed power purchase agreement (PPA). This project on the rocks in May 2011 for lack of funding. This possible abandonment occurred three years after the project was first announced. The PPA was for a term of 25 five years and probably would have entailed a purchase of several hundred million dollars of wind power by DELMARVA Power.
http://thedailyrecord.com/2011/05/30/delaware-wind-project-hits-a-snag/
What was not reported by the Daily Record was that DELMARVA sorely wanted out of the PPA that was forced upon it by the Delaware state government as accounting rules would require DELMARVA to recognize the future payments under the PPA as debt on its balance sheet.
http://www.fasb.org/summary/stsum47.shtml
Hence when Al Gore and John Doerr brought the idea of locating Bloom Energy in Delaware with all those high paying manufacturing jobs that Governor Markell promised, DELMARVA Power jumped at the opportunity to get out from under the PPA with the folks in blue rather than green water. The Blue Water folks walked away from their $2 million deposit (per the Daily Record link above) but did not have to pay DELMARVA Power an additional $6 million. For DELMARVA Power this was a godsend. No debt on the balance sheet, no need to deal with intermittent wind power, and they could simply become Bloom’s agent to collect the subsidy that Governor Markell, Secretary O’Mara, and Bloom negotiated in the smoke and sulfur filled room in the first state. The epitome of win, win and more win
Note the news of the possible demise of the Blue Water project was on May 30, 2011 and this coincides with the permit preparations and bogus tariff approval that allowed the Bloom Boondoggle, the BLOOMDOGGLE, to occur. In January 2012 NRG the developer of the Blue Water project placed the project into a cryogenic deep freeze. Remember Secretary O/Mara issued his bogus coastal zone act completeness report for the Bloom project on February 10, 2012. NRG was probably told to go fly a kite in the windy blue waters off the coast that would soon host the Bloom Coffins.
http://www.nrgenergy.com/nrgbluewaterwind/index.html
DELMARVA Power has a duty to protect its customers, but as Bloom’s agent they have now directly overcharged their customers for excess natural gas beyond the maximum permitted quantity Secretary O’Mara ruled as administratively complete, to generate these unbetter electrons from the Bloom coffins in the coastal zone. Note I use “unbetter” as Bloom in their greenwashing on their website claims to deliver “better electrons”. As the British say sarcastically “better my elbow!”
http://www.bloomenergy.com/clean-energy/
DELMARVA Power may have cleverly slinked away from BLUE WATER, but now that they are a direct party to fraudulent billing to the customers they are licensed to protect under a bogus tariff that exceeds the maximum permitted quantity of natural gas. They are now actually in HOT WATER. Hillary Clinton had WHITE WATER, DELMARVA Power had BLUE WATER, and none of these folks could ever find GREEN WATER as they all simply sucked all the GREEN out of the water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_controversy
As for Governor Markell and Secretary O’Mara neither of them walk on water and both should attend a junior college and learn some ethics and thermodynamics. Better still they should be spending all their time preparing their court defense in the case of Fuel Cell Energy that a federal judge ruled has merit for the cronyism these two gangrene politicians exhibited in welcoming the Bloom BLOOMDOGGLE to the first state.
What Lindsay is saying is logical but I expect higher quality writing on this site… This piece reads as a very scattered list of some random facts. What can we do to question Markell and the State of Delaware on why they think this technology would ever be considered as “green” power generation?
Sam,
The first question is whether or not the company they are attempting to do business with is engaged in a nonpartisan competitive bidding process for a state contract. If it is not, like Bloom or Fisker, you know the deal is a bad one for Delaware. If any governor or Legislature attempts to classify nonrenewable sources as “renewable energy” (natural gas had to be considered renewable for the Bloom Deal to take effect), or if the company the state is proposing to do business does not disclose the energy sources and materials used in construction, or when and how they will bring jobs to Delaware, or whether the state’s lawmakers understand that fuel cell technology is not exactly “cutting edge” (new designs of a base technology nearly 50 years old) and so spending money on something which will almost certainly be outdated 20 years from now when the deal with Bloom is done is a foolish move, those are all good questions. As is why they are allowing technology using air polluting rare earth elements, 98% of which come from China and are not exactly purified, in the construction of the fuel cell “energy servers”. According to testimony from John Nichols and Lindsay Leveen, the state is promising Bloom a total of $1.1 billion, guaranteed, for technology which will create more pollution than it will supposedly eliminate with the fuel cells.
If you are looking for a more science-specific base to ask questions from, please visit Lindsay’s blog and post a comment on it. He will tell you everything you need to know to become an even more informed citizen who will cut through the spin from the state and who can inform your fellow citizens as well. Thank you for visiting our blog page!