CRONY GOVERNMENT BACK SCRATCHING IN COLORADO

Colorado:  Secret energy lab spawns million-dollar government employee

http://watchdog.org/62420/co-secret-energy-lab-spawns-million-dollar-govt-employee/

Watch Dog - Tori Richards - 11/24/2012

Here’s one government employee—the One Million Dollar Man, who makes decisions on where hundreds of millions of YOUR tax dollars will be spent – ON GREEN ENERGY!

If you live outside Colorado, you probably haven’t heard of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory – NREL for short. It’s the place where solar panels, windmills and corn are deemed the energy source of the future and companies who support such endeavors are courted.

Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Lakewood, CO.  The lab sits in the middle of his district.

It’s also the place where highly paid staff decide how to spend hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.

And the public pays those decision-makers well:  NREL’s top executive, Dr. Dan Arvizu, makes close to a million dollars per year. His two top lieutenants rake in more than half a million each and nine others make more than $350,000 a year.

“NREL has given us two of the most significant boondoggles, one of them being ethanol and the other being (bankrupt) Abound Solar,”

NREL’s taxpayer-funded management company has seen its budget more than double since 2006.

Perlmutter’s ties go beyond merely promoting green legislation and lobbying his colleagues for NREL funds. He has received $12,670 in campaign contributions from executives of NREL and its management company, MRIGlobal, a company that describes itself as “an independent, not-for-profit organization that performs contract research for government and industry.”

Solar and wind still remain prohibitively expensive and not viable for general use as are corn and wood chips to fuel cars. Cooke predicts that numerous taxpayer-subsidized companies will go bankrupt in the coming years just as the overinflated housing market came crashing down.

It’s the environmental threat.  Solar companies have been fraught with bankruptcy.

“I’ll tell you what’s pollution,” Cooke said. “It’s solar panels and wind turbines abandoned — things with toxic chemicals in them,” she said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to these things. What do you do with a farm of abandoned wind turbines that are 500 feet tall?”

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