EDITORIAL: Green grift costs Nevada taxpayers millions

NZero just joined Solyndra in the green energy hall of shame.

In 2021, Nevada elected officials heralded NZero, which was then named Ledger8760. The company said it would help governments track their carbon emissions in real time. Reno and Washoe County officials and even then-Gov. Steve Sisolak held a news conference to announce their partnership with the company.

“This is how we fight climate change and protect our state,” Gov. Sisolak said.

“We get to be the city, the county and the state that lead the way into a new day and a new era,” said Bob Lucey, then chair of the Washoe County Commission.

Nope. Instead, they became the latest — but surely not the last — politicians duped by well-connected lobbyists selling green-tinged snake oil. As a recent ProPublicainvestigationexposed, the company didn’t deliver what it promised despite scoring government contracts worth $5.7 million.

“Their software didn’t do what they said it was going to do,” Robin Yochum, a former programs manager at the Governor’s Office of Energy, told ProPublica.

One problem was that NZero struggled to get information from utilities, such as NV Energy and Southwest Gas. The information it did provide was dated. These are the types of hurdles officials should have ironed out before handing the company’s lucrative contracts.

“I did not recall the program providing us with any more detailed information above what we already generate ourselves,” the energy manager for state public works wrote in a 2023 email.

But NZero had a secret weapon. Among its founders were powerful lobbyists, such as Josh Griffin. Its leadership included lobbyists who successfully worked for Uber, Tesla and the NFL’s Raiders.

With relationships like that, the results hardly mattered. Yvanna Cancela, then working as Mr. Sisolak’s chief of staff, investigated ways to get the company a “$5 million contract without a competitive process,” ProPublica reported. When Ms. Yochum objected, she said she was told, “We have to do this. The governor’s office wants to do it, we are going to do it.”

It gets worse. It’s unlikely real-time emissions data is the best use of funding. In 2009, the state came up with a list of 2,000 energy efficiency projects. More than a decade later, many of them haven’t been funded and completed.

If politicians want to reduce carbon emissions, that’s where they should have put the funding that went to NZero.

But as this story shows, the greenest thing about green energy is often the money raked in by the politically well connected.

This commentary initially appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.