Like It Or Not, You’re Paying $2.6 Million For Brooklyn Park’s Solar Panels

Brooklyn Park made headlines earlier this week after announcing the completion of their 6,000 solar panel project. The City claims they will now operate on 100 percent “clean energy,” even though this is patently false. Furthermore, their mayor, Jeff Lunde, even bragged that the City paid nothing for the solar panels.

Of course, all that means is that you are paying the $2.6 million price tag for Brooklyn Park’s new solar panels, whether you like it or not.

100 Percent Renewable is 100 Percent Baloney

Although the media is claiming the solar installation will make Brooklyn Park 100 percent renewable, it actually won’t.  As our readers no doubt already know, solar panels only produce electricity when the sun is shining. This means it is actually impossible for the city streetlamps to be powered by solar.

What this claim actually means is that the panels would produce the equivalent of the electricity used by city facilities in Brooklyn Park. Brooklyn Park will still rely on coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants to generate electricity when the sun isn’t shining, or when the solar panels are covered in snow and it is “too expensive” to clear them off.

This may seem like a petty argument, but it is actually an important point. The inaccurate reporting of solar generation gives the general audience an inaccurate impression of the way that solar works. The electricity generated by the panels does not get stored in the grid for later use because the grid is not a giant battery that holds electricity until it is needed.

In reality, Brooklyn Park simply added expensive solar hood ornaments to a grid powered by coal, natural gas and nuclear power.

“It cost us nothing”

We all know that there is no such thing as a free lunch, so this “free” $2.6 million solar installation built by Brooklyn Park at their city facilities was paid for by someone. That someone was probably you.

The financing for the $2.6 million, 6,000 solar-panel system came from a 30 percent federal subsidy, a litany of government programs in Minnesota that artificially prop up solar power, and financing from solar companies.

This may sound good on its face, but all this does is shift the cost for the system on to federal tax payers and electricity customers in Minnesota, who must pay more for their electricity to pay for the solar panels.

In short, Brooklyn Park’s gain is everyone else’s pain.