LETTERS: Rooftop solar owners err in citing Crescent Dunes

DeWayne McCormick's letter was yet another espousing the virtues of rooftop solar, while lambasting NV Energy and the Public Utilities Commission ("Harming rooftop solar," Wednesday Review-Journal). Every rooftop solar owner likes to use the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant as an example of NV Energy overpaying for power, at 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour to the provider in Tonopah. Rooftop solar proponents must be blinded by sunlight to use this in support of their case.

Crescent Dunes isn't your grandpa's passive rooftop solar. The plant generates power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and NV Energy didn't pay for the plant. Rooftop solar owners signed on as early adopters because they believed they saw a way to make an easy buck at someone else's expense, thinking they had outfoxed everyone. Most of the time, these mini venture capitalists pay the price, while someone else banks their money.

NV Energy's current large-scale facilities can deliver solar power for less than 4 cents per kWh. NV Energy should not continue paying 11.5 cents for small-scale rooftop solar while asking the 97 percent of us to subsidize someone else's mistake. Just who bargained away our rights when deciding that we should forever subsidize 3 percent of Nevada's energy ratepayers, simply because they didn't understand what they signed up for?

Rooftop solar owners need to get rational and go after the solar purveyors, who may have conned and misled them. It wasn't the rest of us ratepayers, guaranteed.

Richard Rychtarik

Las Vegas

Solar subsidies

The "Solar subsidies" editorial (Tuesday Review-Journal) offered the most outrageous business opinion I have ever read. The editorial concluded, "Nevada is well into the race to provide businesses with incentives, chasing and being chased by other states eager to do the same. But the state would better serve its citizens by getting out of economic development altogether and halting the subsidization of private enterprises that will compete against companies that aren't subsidized."

Shame on you. How do you expect this state to progress without offering incentives? Didn't this state recently subsidize the Tesla battery factory? How about the Faraday Future automobile factory?

The editorial noted that the state subsidized solar companies with incentives. Now I get it: incentives for the big guy, nothing for the homeowner/taxpayer. The state should subsidize these big companies with millions of taxpayer dollars, but not one bit of encouragement for the little guy who spent a large chunk of his assets to participate in bringing the sunniest state in the country into the 21st century. Thanks RJ, for nothing.

Stan Nudelman

North Las Vegas

Stadium proposal

Tuesday's Review-Journal editorial states that "the state would better serve its citizens by getting out of economic development altogether and halting the subsidization of private enterprises that will compete against companies that aren't subsidized." On the front page of the Feb. 4 RJ was a story about a proposed domed stadium to be subsidized with $780 million in public money.

The stadium is being pushed by Las Vegas Sands Corp. and other private enterprises. Sheldon Adelson is Las Vegas Sands CEO, and the Adelson family owns the Review-Journal. So, what does the RJ think: Should the stadium be subsidized, and does the boss read his own paper?

Cary De Grosa

Las Vegas