Obama In Denver—Solar Panels to End the Recession?
In Colorado many people have converted Presidents Day into Presidents weekend and make it a 4 day holiday for skiing by taking off Friday as well as Monday. President Obama has made it a 5 day weekend by coming to Denver today to sign the Stimulus bill. It is always exciting to have the President in town. Roads are closed, the media scurries around town searching for exclusive items of meaningless minutia to report to us. Most of what is reported will mean nothing to anyone a few hours after the President has boarded Air Force One heading for home or to his next marketing meeting.
A marketing plan is exactly what is going on these days. Obama is marketing the Stimulus plan and introducing it to an adoring population in exactly the same style that Steve Jobs has used to sell a new Apple product. It works for Jobs. Why not for Obama? This is a petty slick approach to our problems with a few minor differences. When Jobs holds the big intro event for one of his products, the public has his proven record to look at when deciding whether to buy the new I – (whatever). When Jobs says it will work we know it will work.
When the President was in Denver today the cheerleading team was lined up to support his performance and the signing of the almost $800 billion Stimulus Bill .
The differences between Jobs and the President were significant. When Jobs describes his new product we have a choice to buy or not to buy. With the Stimulus Bill we have no choice. We are buying and paying for a product that has a set of assembly directions that no one in Congress read before deciding that this was what we needed and would love to own. Apple has been around for a while and has proven that they know what they are doing. The current administration has been around for about three weeks and is still finding their way to the rest rooms, but has given us a product with a host of unintended consequences waiting to happen.
The President as usual gave a great speech with the 3.5 million jobs to be created or saved this year as a keynote promise of the Stimulus performance. His introduction was by Blake Jones the head of Namaste Solar Electric Inc a manufacturing company based in Boulder Colorado. He gave a great introduction and revved the crowd with the promise that the bill would help his company increase their employment role by about 20 %. A great roar from the audience indicated that the Stimulus had started right here in Denver. The employment problem was being turned around before our eyes by Blake Jones and his company Namaste Solar Electric in the Natural History Museum. As he slid into his introduction of the President Blake gave sincere thanks for the Stimulus being given to his company. A few numbers were mentioned that might have been missed if you coughed once or twice. If I caught the numbers correctly, the 20% increase in employment by his company would be at the rate of one a month for the next year if all went well. That adds up to 12 for the year. Namaste Solar Panels are great products and will be important in the expansion of alternative energy sources as an element in our future. Good for you Blake but Solar Panels will not end the recession.
The recession will be ended by a host of individual efforts across a broad spectrum of business models, most of which will involve traditional employers of large numbers of people. The credit crises must be eased so that entrepreneurs can fund the efforts that will lead us forward. Home construction will, as in every recession, lead the way and hopefully they will all buy solar panels from Namaste. They are good people with a good product and incidentally they know where to buy the best pizza in Boulder.
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Even with Fed subsidies, dollar for dollar, it still takes a lot more money to produce a kilowat of energy using solar than say an electic producing coal fired plant. I’m not saying solar doesn’t have a niche to fill, but as far as supplementing our energy needs in a meaningful way, there hasn’t been much progress since I was in college. And that my friend was a long time ago.