N.C. Taxpayers Scammed by Green Energy Do-Gooders

North Carolinians have fallen victim to the green energy boondoggle. Millions of taxpayer dollars have been funneled into a biofuels center located in Oxford. The facility doesn’t have a viable function other than a coordinator of sorts. Carolina Journal reported the following:

The Biofuels Center is not a science agency, does not produce anything, and has no research labs of its own. Yet it expects to foster an industry that provides 10 percent of North Carolina’s future transportation fuel needs by 2017 and spins off bioplastics, biomaterials, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

The center is working with universities, companies, farmers, growers, counties, and municipalities to create the biofuels sector, Burke said.

The center has awarded nearly $11 million in research grants, conducted education programs, and opened a research and development incubator on its campus.

The center has spawned 20 research projects statewide, and is exploring 17 potential feedstocks — three trees, six energy grasses, four oil-producing crops for diesel, and four starch-producing crops.

Is this a waste of resources and taxpayer largess? A researcher seems to think so:

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the imminent promise of biofuels. That includes Brandon Scarborough, a Charlotte native and Appalachian State University graduate now working as a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Mont.

“There’s mandate after mandate” from government for ethanol, Scarborough said. “But people aren’t going to buy it when it turns out to be more expensive than thought.”

Government sets arbitrary targets “to drum up support for the program, and the chances of meeting those are probably pretty slim,” he said. That includes a federal push to require ethanol to be 15 percent of the blend in gasoline to goose the market artificially.

There are mandates for cellulosic ethanol production and the amount that needs to be blended in gasoline. The federal Renewable Fuel Standard Program mandates use of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel annually by 2022. But producers have been fined for not blending enough of the fuel.

“The reason they weren’t blending it was because there wasn’t any being made; there isn’t a market,” Scarborough said. “It just isn’t cost effective without massive subsidies.” Biomass producers will get involved once government energy portfolio standards “create a pseudo market” for their crops by government mandate, not consumer demand, Scarborough said.

“Then energy producers are forced to go out and find that [supply], and they lobby governments to encourage people to produce those resources at cost-effective prices to them,” Scarborough said. “It simply cannot survive without some sort of economic incentives, which means taxpayers.”

Creating fuels from biomass is “an inefficient process” because the feedcrops are not energy dense. They require large amounts of land and, of concern for drought-prone North Carolina, lots of water, Scarborough said.

Ethanol delivers “roughly about 30 percent less energy” than gasoline, so even when it’s selling for less per gallon, it costs motorists more because they don’t get as many miles per gallon, he said.

Yep, more money thrown down a do-gooder rat hole. When are we going to learn?

Source: http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=9176