Solyndra white courtesy phone, please.
This is the one Google was big into.
One would think the performance of this project could have been predicted to within a few percent, especially given the fact that there have been many projects based on the same principles around the world, as well as in California, back in the 90s.
This was basically a scale-up of an existing technology.
The real purpose of projects like this is to funnel large amounts of government taxpayer money to the right people.
Actually building these white elephants with a part of the money is just a necessary part of the deal.
After all - they have something to show to the people to keep them from wondering what happened to the bulk of the money.
Lordy. Not just half the output, but also $200 per megawatt hour.
And that’s using Natural Gas as a supplemental fuel source.
And now they’ll have a massive toxic waste fiasco on their hands as they have to safely get rid of materials such as gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride. Now these have value, but not enough to make up for the cost of reclaiming them and protecting the environment from them.
Yep, another liberal head-on collision with themselves — similar to the ones seen in the multicultural Native American rights to hunt, vs the rights of cute animals to be protected from hunting.
Yeah, what a waste of sun light that turned out to be. At taxpayers expense too.
It sickens me when I see these stupid gullible people with a solar array on their roof, especially when the roof does not face due south at 30 degrees.
The other day, I saw a church with a hundred or so solar panels. At least half were fogged meaning the seals broke and they were useless.
In my area, solar efficiency is only about 40% of what it is in the desert.
Even when engineering and basic physics predict the outcome of renewable energy plants failing, the environmental fascists just double down. How much money has been poured down the rathole by Obama on this stuff in the last 8 years?
According to plan re soebarkah.
Not really a ‘white elephant’. Here’s the problem. You cannot satisfy environmentalists. First, they condemn energy A. We replace A with a more expensive B. Now, the environmentalists condemn energy source B. Bottom line: the environmentalists cannot be satisfied with any energy source since they all, to a certain extent, pollute.
The only environmentalist I ever saw who was satisfied suggested that a power program instituted in Nepal was a good example for the first world. This program placed a small photovoltaic cell on the room of the one room huts providing sufficient power to run a small hot plate and a radio. The environmentalist consider that to be an adequate living standard.
As I recall, Harry Reid’s son make millions on this boondoggle.
Spit.
This plant fit right in with Obama’s plan to raise the cost of electricity. Wasting our tax dollars to do it just made it a win-win for him.
It would be interesting to see if the private investors managed to come out ahead on the deal. I’d bet that their “investment” was completely covered by various tax credits and expense write-offs, etc.
When birds hit the beams they VAPORIZE in a puff of steam and smoke. And no real serious estimates are done as to just how many birds they kill. There best guess is hundreds. They estimate based on the puffs of steam they see. If you, a citizen, went out and randomly shot hundreds of birds in a year you would be in PRISON.
What seems to be missing in this story (unless I missed it) are some actual numbers of how bad this really is. What was it supposed to produce versus what it actually is producing?