Right Change: Wind Projects Cost $9.8 Million Per Job

In a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included Section 1603, a grant program run through the Treasury Department.

This program offered “renewable energy project developers a one-time cash payment” to reduce the need for green energy companies “to secure tax equity partners” and help them to achieve “the near term goal of creating and retaining jobs in the renewable energy sector.”

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (EREL) tracked the grant program from its inception in 2009 through Nov. 10, 2011. The report is titled, Preliminary Analysis of the Jobs and Economic Impacts of Renewable Energy Projects Supported by the 1603 Treasury Grant Program, and NO you do not have to read it.

The report explains that the program provided “approximately $9 billion in funds to over 23,000 PV and large wind projects.”  PV stands for photovoltaic, which is the method by which solar power is turned into electricity, usually with solar panels or solar cells.  There were specifically 197 large wind projects and 23,692 PV projects that received funds, according to the EREL report.

The bottom line – this “stimulus” program spent $9 billion which produced 910 jobs that will last around 30 years. Just in case you are not great at math, that equals about $9.8 million PER JOB. Yes, you read that correctly. It took our federal government $9.8 MILLION to create a single job. So I guess we can no longer say that Obama has not created any jobs. He is just so bad at knowing how to create them that it costs him millions of dollars to create one. 

But not to worry, of course our government would never be that wasteful of tax payer dollars. Once you add in the roughly 4600 “indirect jobs” then you are only looking at a cool $1.63 million per job. Who wouldn’t be happy with that efficiency?

Every single taxpayer in America should be outraged and appalled by these numbers. Think of what enterprising businessmen and entrepreneurs could have done with that type of money. How many jobs could have been created had the federal government stayed out of Americans’ pockets and not wasted billions of tax payer dollars? America has to vote out Barak Obama so he can no longer “invest” its tax payer dollars into his green energy dreams. 

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