Posted on 09/09/2012 10:29:21 AM PDT by presidio9
It was one year ago this month that the solar manufacturer Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, defaulting on a $535 million federal loan. The company’s name has become Republican shorthand for crony capitalism and the left’s green lunacy.
But the Solyndra story is not a scandal. It is an inevitable bump on the road to a clean-energy economy. And almost everything Americans think they know about Solyndra is wrong.
For starters, this story has bipartisan roots. President George W. Bush signed the bill launching the Energy Department’s loan program in 2005, and his administration selected Solyndra from 143 applicants for the first loan.
The deal almost closed during Bush’s last month in Washington, but the department’s career staff delayed it, saying the loan “appears to have merit” but wasn’t quite ready. Bush aides had given so many assurances to Solyndra’s CEO that they apologized.
Solyndra was not some fly-by-night operation; it was once the toast of Silicon Valley. It had raised $1 billion from elite investors — not just George Kaiser, an Obama bundler, but the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame, Republican donors and the British mogul Richard Branson.
And its slogan, “The New Shape of Solar,” was more than marketing fluff. Most solar panels look like tinted windows. Solyndra’s looked like ladders for lizards. Most panels harvest sunlight with silicon wafers. Solyndra’s relied on a metal mixture called CIGS etched onto elongated glass cylinders. They were unusually expensive, but they clicked together like Legos, which made installation a breeze and helped keep down costs.
The loan program was designed to help companies like Solyndra cross the so-called Valley of Death for risky technologies. The goal was not only to create green jobs, but to reduce our dependence on foreign petro-thugs, our carbon emissions and our vulnerability to energy price shocks.
Helping Solyndra build a factory was expected to create 6,000 construction jobs, 1,800 permanent jobs and enough solar panels to replace a coal plant every year.
Matt Rogers, the Obama administration official who took over the loan program, says he never felt an iota of political pressure to approve Solyndra. Republicans later subpoenaed 300,000 pages of administration documents, and they never found any evidence of politics behind the decision to award the loan.
Solyndra built its factory on time and on budget, which helped reduce the cost of its panels. Its revenues soared, as it attracted customers like Frito-Lay.
But silicon got unexpectedly cheap, so Solyndra’s financials evoked the old joke about losing money on every sale and trying to make it up on volume. The company also made some strategic mistakes and ran out of cash before a new management team could turn things around. Eventually, the Energy Department withdrew its lifeline.
But all lenders make bad loans. Obama’s stimulus package reserved $2.5 billion for Solyndra-style busts. A review led by a Republican financier found that the portfolio — which includes the world’s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world’s largest solar farms and America’s first cellulosic biofuel refineries — is doing fine.
Overall, the stimulus poured $90 billion into clean energy, when the U.S. had been spending just a few billion a year, and it’s launched a quiet green revolution. We’ve doubled renewable power; with help from the low silicon prices that killed Solyndra, solar installations have soared 600%. The stimulus has jump-started the smart electric grid and created a new domestic battery industry for electric vehicles.
It won’t all pan out — that’s the nature of investment. Obama is betting on clean energy, putting public dollars into thousands of firms that can help move us away from fossil fuels. The market is picking the winners and losers, and Solyndra was one of the losers. But there’s nothing scandalous about that.
It should also be noted that the writer employs three other time-honored liberal instruments:
He overstates the benefits of his preferred government intervention. No adult believes that solar can offer any more than 8-10% of our total power needs at any time in the forseeable future.
He implies that because the right is opposed to government intervention, they are opposed to alternative energe. Hasn't bothered to read Romney's platform, I guess.
Finally, when all else fails, he brings it right back to George Bush, who may have supported green energy initiatives, but was clearly not willing to throw good money after bad.
More like an IED.
Why, all one has to do is look at history. Look at the huge Gov’t loans that Ford had to acquire to start his automobile company, or the huge loans that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had to take to start their computer companies. Look at the huge Govt’ loans required to start the bio-med expansions, the huge loans that the Wright Brothers had to undertake to make flight a reality.
Funny ... they didn’t take any loans to get their ideas to take off. If pretty much every company on the face of the planet found economic success without the Gov’t propping them up - why do Green companies require it? Perhaps every other company had an economically viable product?
Sorry Skippy, $535 million of taxpayer dollars in the toilet is a lot of THERE, THERE! Jackass.
But one little steel company that didn’t make it despite Bain Capital’s best efforts makes Romney a murderer in Obama’s TV ads...and Romney was using private money, not taxpayer money!
This Grunwald is married to Maggie Grunwald, a far-Left msm fixture. It figures that they are all trying to rewrite Obama’s crony scendals.
But the Solyndra story is not a scandal. It is an inevitable bump on the road to a clean-energy economy.
Don’t mind the man behind the curtain. 2 + 2 = 5. The sky is pink. Pigs fly.
Cheap empty words do not tell the true story.
He forgot the point about Obama ensuring the loan went to a solid donor to his campaign. He forgot that Obama made sure that the US govt was last on the list of people to be paid out in a bankruptcy, despite being the source of all the funding. This ensured OTHER campaign donors in that industry could walk away clean.
This is sooooo much more than a loan to a company that just didnt work out.
And as for “helping tech companies cross death valley” to get started and help free us from petro-thugs. Let me hip you. IF we drilled here without limits, that would free us from them faster than anything else imaginable. Furthermore, what solyindra sold did not make any economic sense except in a world of government induced artifically high energy prices.
Obastard is killing coal everywhere he can find it. He fights fracking for shale gas. He does everything he can to make prices “neccessarily skyrocket”. In a world with no government whatsoever, if oil and gas and coal became scarce, the prices of those would rise naturally. At some point on the curve, Solyndra would suddenly find that their technology was profitable, and their business would take off.
Solyndra was a scam. Artificially created need, and fed by free government cash, and all for the benefit of democrat supporters and vote buying. Case closed.
Safer to invest with a long lost Nigerian uncle who just needs your bank account number to make deposits.
Grunwald? I stopped reading right there.
and the investment should have stayed with "elite investors" or other non-government investors. Most new products fail in the market place and throwing government politics into the mix corrupts the process making success even less likely. It's a good case study in why "government didn't build that".
I suspect similar ripoffs are happening all over the place.
Here is a story from a neighboring township that took on the cost of asbestos cleanup for a planned ethanol project (Nearly a half million total) and now the company (NextGen) isn’t answering the phone.
http://web.mail.comcast.net/service/home/~/NextGen.pdf?auth=co&loc=en_US&id=346380&part=2
No realistic adult who has looked at the date would expect solar to supply more than 1% of the nations energy supply.
The only place that solar makes economic sense is in areas where it is too expensive to run an electric transmission line.
Even if you can not reasonably run a transmission line to your site it is still more than likely cheaper to have your own diesel generator (and more reliable unless your weather is unusually good).
With out government subsidies solar can not possibly compete with conventional electric generation technology.
Solar is a nitch technology good for powering calculators, watches and phone charges and not much else.
These writers are not journalists. They are LIARS. If they succeed in getting Obama re-elected, I sincerely hope that every single one of them become the first economic casualties of Obama’s second term. Me? I’m dropping out of the work force. I’ve been working 40 years and refuse to continue to bust my a$$ to support Obama’s deadbeats.
http://www.timemediakit.com/us/media/bios/grunwald.html
Time magazine ecochondriac, say no more, say no more.
I am sick of these “Walter Concrete-head” commie media types who seem to think they’re the Intelligentsia and the rest of us are just rude, crude, stupid, and socially unacceptable. - “Concrete-head” mocked and ridiculed Pat
Robertson for witnessing for Christ as the returning Messiah, the only capable Ruler of the Coming Kingdom of God.
The standard for Obama: Look at the portfolio, not just one investment.
The standard for Romney: Don’t look at the portfolio, pick out one investment to look at.
With regard to Solyndra, the pay-off was the legal fees paid to the lawyers who had invested heavily in the Obama campaign. That money was skimmed off the top of the loan guarantees and not recovered.
With regard to companies in which Bain Capital lost money (and workers lost jobs), it was their money they lost, not the taxpayers’ money. In contrast, Solyndra execs lost other peoples money.
With regard to Bush, this is a delicate issue. In hindsight, he sold us - movement conservatives and libertarians - a bill of goods.
Bush, along with others, shares in responsibility for huge deficits, the TARP, the housing bubble, and boondoggles such as subsides to so-called renewable energy.
Bush is to Obama what Hoover was to FDR, the John the Baptist of a socialist Messiah.
It is not clear where Romney stands on the Bush legacy. Hopefully, he is smart enough to move on from that agenda.
Sure. Got it.
I guess political thievery and influence peddling is OK now - if you are the "right" sort of people and have the "right" connections? Frankly, this used to be referred to as "graft" and "bribery" and people went to jail for it!
But, that was long, long ago in a country now unfamiliar and far, far away...
LMFAO @ Michael Grunwald! Nice try for a liberal hack. However, losing $535 million of taxpayers money may not be a lot to you among $16 TRILLION, but the loss is still “there”. And that’s not a good thing no matter how it’s spun.
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