White House Wants Solar Power for Poor People

The Obama White House wants to provide low-income people with access to solar power. The Washington Post reports:

[The effort] includes a new initiative to ramp up so-called “community solar” projects across the country — programs in which one solar installation supplies energy to multiple different homes or individuals — with a focus on serving low- and middle- income Americans. It also includes a pledge to install a total of 300 megawatts of solar and other renewables in federally subsidized housing developments by the year 2020 (each megawatt represents roughly enough solar to power 164 homes).

Among the reasons why low-income people have low incomes is government’s misallocation of resources to unproductive endeavors. Surely, while looking for a job that can’t exist in this economy, getting some power from an inefficient, unreliable, and unnecessarily expensive source will provide low-income folks with small comfort.