Enter a caption (optional)

This week, mainstream media outlets are breathlessly reporting that Las Vegas, one of America's most visible energy hogs, is now powered entirely by renewable energy. Those reports are false.

Enter a caption (optional)

The first tip-off is this (accurate) statement in the widely-misunderstood source article, from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, that states "the city's energy savings because of its shift to renewable sources is estimated at roughly $5 million annually." Folks, for those of you that've been to Las Vegas, $5 million sounds like any single casino's monthly electricity bill, not the sum annual bill of all 100-plus casinos in town; some back-of-the-napkin math shows that if $5 million covered just the casinos and not the entire city, each casino would only be running up a bill of $4,000 a month, which is obviously not true.

Enter a caption (optional)

Enter a caption (optional)

So what's going on here? Misinterpretation. The LVRJ article is talking about the City of Las Vegas, capital "C," i.e. the Las Vegas city government. All of Las Vegas' municipal facilities, from streetlights to parks to government buildings, have been switched over to renewable energy. This has been achieved with a combination of locally-installed solar panels, credits, and a major boost from Boulder Solar 1, a massive 100-megawatt solar facility located in Boulder City, Nevada.

Las Vegas' Symphony Park is powered entirel by renewable energy. The casinos and hotels around it are not

The City of Las Vegas, Mayor Carolyn Goodman, utilities company NV Energy and all of the folks who worked to get the city's 140 municipal facilities on green power deserve to be lauded for their accomplishment. And reports that the entire freaking city are running on renewables need to stop. If the gullible are led to believe that it's easy for a city of 24-hour casinos and hotels to go green, then they are failing to understand the magnitude of the challenge of switching over to renewables--and allowing anti-environmentalist bodies to rule them out as clueless, wide-eyed innocents.