Obama's Green Jobs 'Solyndra' under investigation for waste, fraud and abuse

What do you expect from a man that appoints a Treasury Secretary that can't handle his own taxes, a Surgeon General that is overweight to the point of being obese, a vice President that can't keep his mouth shut, and has never worked a real job a day in his life?

I don't think he has ever served in the military either.

 

Obama's economic foresight and business acumen are truly something to behold. With him at the helm, there is nothing this country cannot accomplish.

 

I'm sure that was what the 1,100 unemployed green workers thought when Uncle Obama gave them the $535 million taxpayer dollars.

I feel sorry for us and those poor schmucks in California who trusted Obama.

 

That's absolutely nothing for a guy who has blown through trillions of other people's dollars. NOTHING!

 

Did the company recently go public?

 

I don't know.

Why do you ask?

 

The backers had invested a billion dollars in the company... I just don't get how a well funded start up could go so wrong with their business plan unless something was fishy.

 

So Obama is supposed to be able to see into the future and somehow know which companies are going to succeed or fail?

Or is that he's only supposed to give support to companies that are on such solid footing they don't need support?

The point of loan guarantees is to provide a boost to an economic sector that you think is important, either economically or security wise. You might provide guarantees to 10 companies, knowing that four or five of them will probably fail anyway. But you're kick starting an industry.

That's how venture capitalists think: in percentages. Some of their investments will fail; that's life. The good venture capitalists do their homework to reduce the risk, and have more wins than losses.

Also, the earlier in a company's or industry's life cycle that you invest, the higher your risk -- but also the higher your potential reward. For angel investors -- those venture capitalists who invest at the very earliest stages of a company's growth -- probably a majority of their investments fail. But the ones that pay off pay off big, enough to pay for several failures.

If I were the White House, I'd put out a list showing all the companies that received loan guarantees, and where they're at now, along with an analysis of the effect of the guarantees. And then say, "Yes, this company failed; that sort of thing was not unexpected. But these succeeded. More importantly, we are investing *now* so we can be a world leader in green technology when it takes off a decade from now."

 

Excuses, excuses, excuses. I guess "the buck stops here" is just an antiquated notion for Obama supporters.

 

Something WAS fishy. You see, these idiot businessmen thought a marginal and costly technology that cannot effectively power large cities or transmit electricity efficiently over long distances would be profitable, when anyone with a lick of business sense knew that wasn't the case. Any industry that requires massive subsidization is destined to fail in the private market.

 

Oh please.. Solar panels are not rocket science..

Most start ups are UNDERFUNDED..

The Saudis with the help of the Germans and Japanese have whole solar villages completely off grid since 1982....

Either the CEO was a dunce, it should have worked.

 

green tech has been epic fail in country after country and relied on government subsidies to survive

http://webecoist.com/2009/05/04/10-abandoned-renewable-energy-plants/

 

Did you fail to read what I wrote, or did you just fail to understand it?

 

Solar applications are used everywhere these days.... Even a smallish one can keep you in hot water if you use a large tank.... in the attic..

 

That's because it's a startup competing against an entrenched fossil-fuel industry with huge sunken costs and already-built infrastructure.

The purpose of subsidies is to build the industry to the point where economies of scale can take over and make it cost-competitive.

Of *course* it's a fail until that point. What part of "startup" and "long-term investment" is unclear?

Plus, were green-tech companies somehow supposed to be immune to the recession? Heck, they're more vulnerable, because when people are trying to cut short-term costs, they're going to go with the cheapest short-term energy, regardless of its environmental or long-term downsides.

Proponents of green energy tend to talk about a decade-long investment horizon. Critics wait a year and say "look, it failed." Genius.

 

You have it right on every point.

 

Small scale solar is great large scale not so great. I have a small home made solar thermal on my shop to help with the heating, too many trees in my yard for it to help much but whatever. Going to make a mini greenhouse and experiment with some solar voltaic for night time heating. Can't put one on my house or Riley would have his gestapo on me LOL

 

I installed solar panels in 1979 in SC..for a five bathroom house.. Saved me tons of money.

 

Yes, but when the venture capitalist is not really a venture capitalist, like in this case, those risk parameters are no going to be examined properly. If this company has promise, at least promise enough to warrant to loan it secured from the government, then if should have had no problem securing the loan from a private source. When the time comes that alternative energy is actually an efficient substitute for fossil fuels, you will know. Sure, there will be early entrants, but the important capital is not in production, it will come in distribution.

 

Not in downtown Charleston you didn't, or at least you could not now , the historic committee would put you in the stocks for a day then run you out of town on a rail after the tar and feathering ROFL

 

But they are overly costly and incapable of transmitting energy efficiently over long distances, making them a marginal technology with very limited application and profitability. Solar panels cannot power large cities or anywhere that has even intermittent cloud cover. It isn't economically viable on a large scale, and that's why it failed!

And this one was over-funded, and it still failed.

Saudi Arabia is a sun-drenched desert with about 8% of the population of the US. What's more, solar only accounts for a tiny portion of their overall energy consumption.

CEO was definitely a dunce for thinking it would work. Obama, too.

 

Here's more details on what happened and what they did wrong.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/b...-firm-aided-by-federal-loans-shuts-doors.html

excerpt

Two other American solar companies, Evergreen Solar and SpectraWatt, also sought bankruptcy protection in August, and both said competition from Chinese companies had contributed to their financial problems.

In the case of Solyndra, some experts said that regardless of the competition, the company’s unique designs, which were expensive to manufacture, were to blame for its failure.

Solyndra was promised loans of up to $535 million under a guarantee program authorized by Congress as part of the 2009 stimulus package. The Energy Department has made more than 40 promises of guarantees, of which Solyndra was the first. It has committed $18 billion in guarantees and expects to allocate several billion dollars more by the time the program finishes at the end of September.

The government calculates premiums for the guarantees, essentially a loan fee based on the risk of default, but it picks up the cost of the premiums for the companies in the subsidy program. By that yardstick, it has spent $2.4 billion in credit subsidies for the program.

Solyndra’s troubles have been growing for some time. Republican budget-cutters in Congress have viewed it as a model of poor government investment.

“In an apparent rush to push stimulus dollars out the door, the Obama administration wasted $535 million in taxpayer funds in guaranteeing a loan to a firm that has proven to be unviable in the global market,” said Representative Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican who is chairman of an investigative subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

He said the Energy Department might have authorized the guarantee because an Oklahoma oil man who was a donor to the Obama campaign, George Kaiser, was an investor in the project. In a joint statement, Mr. Stearns and Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, the chairman of the committee, said, “We smelled a rat from the onset.”

But the Energy Department dismissed that assertion, saying that Solyndra applied for federal help during the Bush administration and that Obama-era officials merely finished the process the Republicans had begun.

The department says government subsidies are essential to keep the United States competitive in renewable energy, and not all companies will succeed.

“The project that we supported succeeded,” insisted Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the Department of Energy.

“The facility was producing the product it said it would produce, and consumers were buying the product,” he said. “The company struggled because the market has changed dramatically.”

Although the government typically guarantees loans made to a company by a commercial bank, that was not the case for Solyndra. Solyndra borrowed the money from the Federal Financing Bank, part of the Treasury Department, so in effect, the government was lending the money to the company directly. The Energy Department gave Solyndra a conditional guarantee for $535 million, in multiple stages, contingent on reaching a variety of milestones, and to date, it had received $527 million.

 

The government, by definition, steps in when the private sector cannot/will not. That generally occurs in two situations:

1. The investment is riskier than private investors will accept, and the government has non-financial reasons for getting involved.
2. The scale of the investment is too large for private investors to handle.

In this case, it was something of a combination. Green tech is just starting out. It's not only risky, but the payoff is 10 years off. The feds support it as a way to help the U.S. become the leader in an industry that will only get bigger as time goes by, and to start digging our way out of our energy-dependence hole.

It's similar to the GM bailout. There, the private sector didn't get involved because the scale of the investment -- $40 billion -- was simply too large. So the government stepped in, for three reasons:

1. Wanting to avoid the collapse of a major industrial sector in the middle of a deep recession;
2. Wanting to preserve strategically-important heavy manufacturing technology and expertise.
3. No one else had pockets deep enough to do it.

But did the government just grant free passes to everyone involved? No. They acted in every way like a private-sector DIP lender.

It was a gamble, but it seems to have worked. But if it hadn't, that wouldn't mean it was a bad gamble -- just that the dice didn't come up right.

There's always an increased risk of carelessness when you're not playing with your own money. But you can't actually presume that. The government has a pretty reasonable record when it comes to loan guarantees. It's not the same thing as flushing money down a toilet.

 

"Green" technology is never going to take off. It's too expensive, too inefficient, and too harmful to the environment.

 

Solar energy was supposed to be the clean, smart, "progressive" energy of the future and the basis of liberal hope.

Solar was decreed by the Emperor as the replacement for fossil fuels that would provide good jobs for Americans.

And one by one all Obama's green factories are going out of business.

I wonder what his Plan B is?

But you know he's led a sheltered life in government and academia where liberals always enjoy sweet dreams and their fantasies never fail.

So I'll bet he never planned for a Plan B.