According to the Denver Post, no bidders showed up for the first auction for three parcels of land in Colorado's San Luis Valley, even though five solar development companies had expressed interest in the land.
Three parcels covering 3,700 acres in so-called solar-energy zones were offered on Thursday. The bureau has created 19 zones for large solar projects in six Western states, encompassing nearly 300,000 acres, the newspaper reported.
"We are going to have to regroup and figure out what didn't work," Maryanne Kurtinaitis, the renewable-energy program manager for the BLM's Colorado division, told the Denver Post. "It is always tough to be the first out of the chute. This is a learning experience."
The marks aren't so gullible any more, most likely.
he 2013 Atlantic hurricane season looks set to go down as a big washout, marking the first time in 45 years that the strongest storm to form was just a minor Category 1 hurricane.
There could still be a late surprise in the June 1-Nov. 30 season, since the cyclone that mushroomed into Superstorm Sandy was just revving up at this time last year.
But so far, at least, it has been one of the weakest seasons since modern record-keeping began about half a century ago, U.S. weather experts say. Apart from Tropical Storm Andrea, which soaked Florida after moving ashore in the Panhandle in June, none of this year’s cyclones has made a U.S. landfall.
That meant relief for tens of millions of people in U.S. hurricane danger zones. But 2013 has been a bust for long-range forecasters who had predicted a stronger-than-usual burst of activity in the tropical Atlantic.
It has been “a very strange sort of year” in the unpredictable world of cyclones, said Jeff Masters, a hurricane expert and director of meteorology at Weather Underground.
“We’ve been in this multi-decadal pattern of activity but it just didn’t happen this year,” Masters said, referring to the prolonged period of increased hurricane activity that began in 1995.
Well, reality wins out once again.
When opinion and reality conflict - guess which one is going to win in the long run.