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

Where is Saudi Arabia located?

 

I think we've heard every excuse except for the all time favorite "It's Bush's fault".

 

Look around you.. they have tremendous solar applications in Germany and Sweden.

 

But they don't have Obama micro managing their economy.

I wonder if they would take him off our hands for a generous consideration?

 

Their product was too expensive to manufacture.. they needed to rethink what they were doing.

 

this from the article really ticks me off to no end

Taxpayers might be on the hook for most of the loan if Solyndra is unable to repay, said experts in the stimulus and loan guarantee program. The Energy Department could seek repayment in court, but receiving more than a nominal amount is unlikely because of the company’s depleted cash and assets.

“Congress recognized the risks inherent in such an effort and wisely set aside funding to offset any potential defaults or losses,” Leistikow’s statement said.



congress recognized the risks?????? recognized the risks????

If they want to get into the venture capital business then get out of DC and go start a fund or work for a VC. This stuff is not what they are supposed to be doing with OUR MONEY


According to mr math, $535 million divided by 1100 jobs = more than $450,000 per job...........how stimulating

 

Not only is it morally unacceptable to place the burden of risk on all Americans not one would accept it privately, it is also poor economic reasoning. Risk is built into the price of the capital. It would not a matter of no one accepting the risk it is a matter of the company no accepting the terms. When the government takes over it scews the pricing mechanism and inherently created economic inefficient.

I disagree with the underlying premise of "too big to finance." Also, this certainly would not be one of those cases.

We account for risk in pricing, it is why a financial pricing mechanism exist! GM should have gone belly up, but that is another argument.

By creating more mal-investment which will necessarily end in a crash?

There are private energy companies out there. Them, and their R&D, are preserved by sound business models and willing investors.

Once again, we account for the supply of capital when pricing said capital. Sure, there is enough capital out there to probably put trillions in alternative energy. The problem is that right now in would be inefficient, and the cost would be too high.

So long as the suppliers of capital do not get to act as autonomous parties is not similar to a private sector transaction. It is one hundred percent impossible for the government, in any circumstances, to act as a private sector party.

 

The first cell phones were the size of suitcases, cost thousands of dollars, had a battery life measured in minutes, and let you speak to about 10 people.

There is no compelling market reason why solar energy cannot be produced at a cost-per-kilowatt that competes with or bests oil. The biggest remaining barrier is economies of scale.

Sure, there are places where solar energy doesn't work. It's not a cure-all. But then, nobody serious has ever argued that it will totally replace oil. Only that we could meet a very large chunk of our energy needs with it.

 

OK.

And it only cost the taxpayers $535 million to find that out.

Obama is a genius.

 

Let's get one thing straight. This didn't fail because it was run by the government. It failed because it is "green" technology and green technology simply will not work.

 

how much were they subsidized, might want to read this

http://repec.rwi-essen.de/files/REP_09_156.pdf

solar won't be a viable energy source until they develop a cheap substitute for platinum in fuel cells

 

It isn't economies of scale. It is too expensive and inefficient. We should be investing in 4th generation nuclear technology. That is guaranteed to be safer, cheaper, and cleaner than any other energy source.

 

It's about different horizons and goals. Not everything is best served by a financial payoff horizon measured in months or a few years.

The government, through the NSF, funds basic research for exactly this reason: it's *basic* research, and won't have financial payoffs for years, if ever. No private investor would touch it.

But without it, we wouldn't have anywhere near the level of technology we have today.

When's the last time the private sector put together a $40 billion DIP package?

Agreed. But $40 billion is putting a lot of chips on one bet.

They *did* go belly-up. All the government did was let them go through Chapter 11 instead of Chapter 7.

Quite a few assumptions there, don't you think? Companies do Chapter 11/Chapter 7 all the time. Are they automatically mal-investment?

The government's goal is to *build* an industry that is currently in its infancy, and do it *sooner* than the market will, so that we, not China, own the industry.

Okay. It will never be exactly the same, but what the government did in the GM bailout was pretty darn close.

 

I have no issue with nuclear energy, as long as the designs are safe. But simply asserting that solar energy is inherently too expensive and inefficient holds no water.

 

Everything I've seen says solar costs around 5x as much as the average.

 

Financial payoff is merely indicative of the companies reaching their goals.

Yes they would, because they do. The areas of research that become politicized are the ones where by the cost of financing is deemed to great by those seeking capital.

I disagree. If this research was to be privately financed the time constraints would have been greater and the oversight more thorough. You seem to assume that because the government did finance certain research that actually produced results in the past that the results would never have occurred without the financing. It merely means we either financed too early, which would be inefficient, or that we placed an unfair burden of risk on society. Federal funding also ran the risk of removing competition, which would also produce inefficient and slow results.

The private sector would have analyze firms individually rather providing a blanket loan. For some reason this seemed to be an instance were government decided not to pick winners. It doesn't really matter though, the level of risk relative to the price of the loan was clearly wrong.

Chapter 11 shouldn't exist, but that is much larger argument.

No, not if the investment in the bankrupt firm was from private institutions and those institutions had to face the losses incurred by bad loans. However, if the government decides that the private sector price of financing is too high and decides to issue their own loan, they are creating an environment whereby an unfair exposure exist to the entire tax paying population. Not to mention that artificially low prices are going to create a surplus (the bad kind) of product in one area and a deficiency in another.

Who is we? There is no "we" that owns any industry.

In what manner? GM should no longer exist.

 

No one cares if investors were stupid enough to fall for the smoke and mirrors. Obama committed our hard earned tax dollars to that lead balloon.

 

I'm sure they were hard earned alright.

 

They need to sell those green chip stocks before they are worth only Buffalo chips.

Just what any faltering economy needs skyrocketing solar energy costs.

 

As of 2009, solar-generated power cost a bit more than twice as much as coal or nuclear and 3x natural gas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

But the cost of solar power has been falling steadily as new technology and economies of scale kick in:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2010/11/101105-cost-of-solar-energy/

It's already cost-competitive in areas like Hawaii -- where conventional power is expensive and sunshine plentiful. It's also cost-competitive when used as a "peaking" source of power -- reserve generation capacity that kicks in at times of peak demand, which tend to coincide with daylight hours. Conventional peaking plants are very expensive on cost-per-kilowatt basis. Solar is not.

The article notes that with the cost of solar dropping and the cost of fossil fuels rising, solar power will likely reach "grid parity" by 2017 -- meaning it will be just as cheap/expensive as conventional fuels.

 

Yes, but it's a short term horizon with only one measure -- profit. There are other horizons and other payoffs that are worthwhile.

That's why we *have* a government. To avoid things like the "tragedy of the commons" or to pursue projects (like, say, interstate highways) that benefit everyone, but with a benefit so diffuse or difficult to profit from that the private sector won't do it.

I think you misunderstand what "basic research" means.

Basic research is pure science. It's not "applied science", where you're studying how to make a better polymer with clear commercial applications. It's studying chemistry or physics or biology for no other reason than to expand scientific knowledge.

The market doesn't support such research because it's expensive, there's no clear economic payoff in terms of spin-off products, and any such payoff is usually decades in the future.

But it's such research that lays the groundwork for applied research that *does* lead to spin-off projects.

Further, you don't *want* private companies controlling such research, because then they own it, and they hide it behind patents and corporate secrets. That impedes technological advancement.

There are no private investors supporting particle physics research, for example. For a long time there was no private support for nanotechnology research, either -- yet now that knowledge is used to build ever-smaller microchips and other tiny structures.

There's a reason why research universities exist, and tend to support a cluster of technology startups. The university does the basic research; the companies commercialize and expand on whatever research happens to pan out. But without the non-profit-motivated basic research, the companies wouldn't exist.

 

He's like a King Midas from Hell. Instead of things turning into gold, it turns to dirt.

 

Remember when Obama said that he wasn't just going to throw money at the problem? He said that he was going to invest on what works. He invested a lot of money in a lot of projects. Barely any which actually produced job. One of which actually declared bankruptcy after receiving over a half billion dollars in stimulus money.

View videos here

For those of you who don't remember, Obama insisted in May of last year that Solyndra would prove it's worth in 'leading the way for a brighter more prosperous future.'

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYiJ-_K9NCo"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYiJ-_K9NCo[/ame]

It turns out that the company Solyndra never made a single dime. Not before or after they received the $535 million dollar subsidy. Just a sad example of your tax dollars at work due to the power of the stimulus. One thing Solyndra has proven was that Obamanomics is a total failure. All the stimulus has shown was that Government is only good for mis-allocating resources in the economy. $500 Million dollars and 1,100 jobs lost. A very costly investment.

Can't wait to see what his plan is going to be for his Job Speech.

 

Haha, yep. 533 Million more right down the crapper....we need more revenue.

If he's going to honestly talk about jobs, maybe he should make sure all the Taxpayers know he wants to spend anywhere from 500Million to 2 billion to create jobs. But not here in America, nope this was pledged to create jobs in the Middle East.

 

sorry...does that logic only work for GM?