The Federal and California governments are like the physician in the classic Henny Youngman two-liner – “A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn’t pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.”
That’s exactly what these behemoth bureaucracies do at enormous expense when they try and breathe life into falling or failed projects whose only rationales are their enormity, expense and political correctness – I’m even leaving out the influence of political contributions. The remote politicians are going to prove they are smarter than mere citizens even if they have to drive us to the poorhouse the long way around to do it.
Recently, I was reading about what I call a “suicide attempt” by the overly complex and outrageously expensive Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS). The system mis-pointed some of its 173,500 heliostats (with 347,000 mirrors) at the wrong floor of one of the towers topped with a boiler and, like the satellite weapon in a James Bond movie, started a fire (oops) – well, what do you expect for a mere $2.2 billion?
It’s like Google, a big ISEGS investor, sending your kids who were searching for an episode of Dora the Explorer to a porn site instead. Anyone ever heard of a lockout?
Predictably, the plant has failed to attain its agreed two-year operational milestones, but not to worry, the California Public Utilities Commission gave it more time to reach the output levels required by the power purchase agreement instead of declaring it in default. Now aren’t you surprised?
While this little unscheduled cookout was going on at the world’s most expensive solar barbecue, the first phase of the bullet-in-the head train was “quietly” (according to Politico) getting a four-year reprieve, from 2018 to 2022, of its well-deserved death sentence from the Obama administration. If there ever were a justification for capital punishment, this project is it.
If they can’t get the easiest-to-build and least expensive segment started on time and in budget, how do you think they will do with the hard part? This $45 billion, oops $59 billion, oops $64 billion project is already a money pit even though they are moving almost no dirt. As the headline read, “The California bullet train mega-project was even less shovel-ready than advertised.”
“It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!” shouts Colin Clive, playing Dr. Henry Frankenstein in the 1931 movie bearing the character’s last name and Gov. Jerry Brown playing himself in the Sacramento follies. Both the movie and the project are classic horror stories.
There are only three possible answers for this situation: the project’s supporters lied, they were incompetent, or most likely it was a combination of the two.
California Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno) compared the project’s ever-changing schedule, budget and plans to a skit on Saturday Night Live but he’s wrong; Saturday Night Live was funny, this is not.