Obama Administration Fast-Tracks Solar Farms, Keystone Pipeline Still Delayed

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Written By:
Rob Port

Oct 13, 2012
12:36pm

Here in North Dakota, a small oil refinery planned to be built on Indian reservation land required ten years of grinding through federal red tape before it finally got approval.

Also impacting North Dakota are on-going delays in building the Keystone XL pipeline expansion. The pipeline could help alleviate the problems with a bottleneck in getting oil out of the state, but despite years of study, the Obama administration continues to withhold approval.

But approval for huge new solar farms? No problem (via Bruce Oksol).

The Obama administration has formally adopted a plan to help create large-scale solar energy plants, offering incentives for solar developers to cluster projects on 285,000 acres of federal land in the western U.S and opening an additional 19 million acres of the Mojave Desert for new power plants.

The plan places 445 square miles of public land in play for utility-scale solar facilities. The program, announced Friday by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at an event in Las Vegas, will apply to new projects only and not the 17 solar facilities already awarded permits or the 78 currently in the approval pipeline.

Oil works. Solar power does not. But under President Obama’s administration, and with help from congressional Democrats, oil gets roadblocked while solar gets fast tracked.

Which isn’t to say that I think solar powers should be roadblocked. I’d just like government to get out of the way with all the red tape and subsidies and other interventionist policies and let oil and solar and every other power source compete in a free market.