One day last week at 3:00 am, my 9 month old decided that sleep was not in the cards. Nothing I tried worked. Determined not to be bothered by it, I let her 
play in her room while I surfed on my laptop. Somehow I ended up on Rush Limbaugh’s website, and started looking around. I had high expectations. I may not agree with much of his views, but I do respect him for having captured the imagination and attention of millions of listeners. I was looking for substance, things to learn, and ideas I had not yet considered.
It didn’t take me long to be disappointed. It only took me 5 minutes to discover inaccurate information. Here’s an example. It appears that a caller had an interesting 
conversation with Rush about solar power/energy. Apparently Rush does not believe that solar panels on a house are efficient enough to supply an average home’s electricity during the day. Further, he is unable to imagine how excess electricity produced by panels can be sold back to the grid.
Read the following excerpt (from his own website), and here’s a link to the transcript where you can also listen to the audio version. I will highlight some of the inaccuracies after the excerpt.
CALLER: . . . . but allow homeowners to install the solar panels that — you know, that they’re creating their own electricity, when you’re not using your electricity, you know, that electricity is all sold back to the electric companies. Okay?
RUSH: What do you do when it’s cloudy?
CALLER: Well, then –
RUSH: They don’t work when it’s cloudy, and they don’t work very well when it’s sunny. They’re not very efficient. It’s a myth these solar panels. It’s a great idea in the future, we’re not there yet. . . .
CALLER: See, I’ve heard other people who say that they can actually go outside and see their electric meter running backwards, which means they are –
RUSH: No, no, no, no, no, no. You can’t possibly — you cannot — please, Paula. You don’t believe those stories?
CALLER: Well, now that you’ve told me it’s not true, I’m going to believe you over them.
RUSH: That doesn’t happen. There is no way that any device that you put on your house is going to roll back the amount of electricity you’ve used. It might slow the meter down if there’s any truth to this to where it moved very slowly forward or didn’t move at all, but I don’t think those meters are allowed to go backwards.
Unfortunately for the caller and all of his listeners that day, Rush is completely wrong. Solar panels DO work in cloudy conditions (certainly with much lower output production), just as your solar-powered calculator (with its low-grade and inefficient solar cells) works on cloudy and rainy days.
Furthermore, it is in fact possible for the meter to run backwards. Net metering, created specifically for the purpose of selling 
electricity back to the power grid, makes this possible. According to the US Department of Energy, it is offered in over 35 states. Interestingly, conservapedia brings back no hits on ‘net meetering’ search. Draw you own conclusions. I won’t argue that solar panels are not expensive, but I strongly object to dissemination of inaccurate information by a prominent conservative personality.
Mr. Limbaugh, you are in front of the golden microphone. People listen to you, depend on you for information, and look to you for direction. If you are uninformed about a particular topic or are unsure about factuality of a specific statement, admit that much and refrain from speaking authoritatively on the matter. That is what one would expect from a sound-minded, dependable, and well-informed leader.
Are you such a person Mr. Limbaugh? Prove it.
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February 24, 2008 at 12:03 am |
The sad thing is he makes a lot of money talking authoritatively on subjects he knows nothing about.