Sunday, February 24, 2013

CO: Secret energy lab spawns million dollar govt employee

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. - Colorado Watchdog

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.

But what is really going on there? Energy expert Amy Oliver Cooke drove out to the site, which looks something like Nevada’s Area 51 with its remote location and forbidding concrete buildings. NREL had started a construction project and Cooke wanted to see for herself. She didn’t get far: a man in an SUV seemingly appeared out of nowhere, stopped her car, and told her to leave.

“A beefy looking fellow told me, ‘It’s top secret,’ said Cooke, director of the Energy Policy Center at the Independence Institute think tank. “I said, ‘I’m a taxpayer and I want to see what you’re building’ and he said it was it was ‘top secret so we can bring Americans a better future.’”

With its bloated budget and overseen by a $533 million a year government-funded management company, Cooke isn’t buying it....

From its inception, NREL has been managed by MRIGlobal, back then called the Midwest Research Institute.

To handle lab management, MRIGlobal partnered with Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute, which describes itself as “the world’s largest nonprofit research and development organization.” The pair formed Alliance for Sustainable Energy, a separate non-profit in 2008, for the sole purpose of managing NREL and installed NREL’s top executives as its directors.

Despite record federal debt, municipal bankruptcies and a nagging global recession, those executives enjoy pay packages that are out of reach of most Americans who pay their salaries. MRIGlobal and Alliance tax documents obtained by Watchdog show most earned well into six-figures...

The budget to manage Alliance is mind-boggling — and rising. For 2010, tax documents show, Alliance received $532.9 million from the Department of Energy, a whopping $189 million more than they were paid in 2008....

In fact, the billions that have been siphoned into renewable energy have yet to produce a fraction of the promised return...

Who’s to blame for the industry’s troubles? Government subsidies? Poorly run companies? Insufficient demand? Foreign competition?

Perlmutter blamed the Tea Party.

“It is clean and it is the future of energy production,” Perlmutter wrote on his website. “Until the Tea Party took over this has always been a simple, noncontroversial tax credit.”