In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece , Roger Meiners describes a stimulus grant for solar panels awarded to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Ennis (Montana) Fish Hatchery. The article points out that, given the projected average annual electricity savings, the simple payback for the $179,000 grant will be seventy years. Thus, the cost of the project will outlive the panels themselves by 30 years, given the currently optimistic life of photovoltaic panels of 40 years.

Well, you say, everyone makes mistakes. However, this one item is only one of many, indicating that the whole stimulus for “green” projects is a mistake. Take the $2.4 billion in grants for the Electric Drive Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative . This is primarily for companies making batteries for hybrids and plug-in EV’s, but includes the Volt, Ford Focus, and Chrysler-Fiat electric vehicles. The top 15 grants in this program range from $10 million to $300 million. The BEV industry today is like the computer industry of the late 1980s, populated by many aspiring start-ups but including a few giants like IBM and Univac. The competition then was undistorted by government largess, and the best companies won and now share the market, which innovated so fast precisely because of the competition, which continues to this day.