Solar Power: Obama's Enron

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We have seen the future, and it went bankrupt.

If the praises of high-ranking Obama-administration officials were a viable business plan, the solar-panel maker Solyndra would be an industrial juggernaut. Vice President Biden insisted that the jobs created by the California-based firm would “allow America to compete and to lead like we did in the 20th century.”

In a visit to Solyndra in May 2010, President Obama called it “a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism.” He all but redefined the traditional statement of Americanness to encompass motherhood, apple pie, and the conversion of sunlight into electricity through cylindrical thin-film solar cells, the specialty of Solyndra.

Obama and Biden were literally invested in Solyndra’s success. The company got a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, the first in a highly vaunted Department of Energy green-jobs program, as part of the stimulus. This was supposed to be the new economic model: government and its favored industries cooperating to lead the country into a green, politically approved recovery.

The showcase firm is now filing for Chapter 11 in an embarrassing blow to the premises of Obamanomics. At least the Obama administration can’t be accused of practicing industrial policy the old-fashioned way and picking winners. It is evidently quite ready to pick losers, too.

A Department of Energy spokesman explained wanly, “The company was considered extraordinarily innovative as recently as 2010.” Innovative, maybe; profitable, no. It had never turned a profit since its founding in 2005. In the still “extraordinarily innovative” year of 2010, it canceled an attempted IPO and axed its CEO.

Plenty of venture capitalists made foolish bets on Solyndra, but the federal government was the most reckless. The Obama administration wanted to throw money at the likes of Solyndra without due diligence, or much diligence at all. In 2008, the Government Accountability Office warned that the Energy Department loan program — created in a 2005 energy bill — had inadequate safeguards.

Nonetheless, within 60 days of becoming energy secretary, Steven Chu put Uncle Sam on the hook for Solyndra. According to the Wall Street Journal, $527 million of the $535 million federal loan has been drawn down, with a bankruptcy court set to determine how much the feds will recover. Chu is fortunate that taxpayers can’t bring shareholder lawsuits against the federal government.

President Bush was flayed for the Enron bankruptcy, based on his tenuous ties to the firm. If the same media rules applied, Solyndra would be Obama’s Enron, given his active promotion of the company and his lavish funding of it. A prodigious Obama-Biden fundraiser is a major backer of the failed concern.

Solyndra’s crash comes during a wave of solar bankruptcies. The government’s enthusiasm for solar power far outstripped that of consumers. Spain provided something of a precursor. It massively subsidized a solar-power industry that collapsed when the government realized its generosity was unsustainable and cut back. One Spanish newspaper had a headline, “Spain admits that the green economy sold to Obama is a ruin.”

China is picking up the pieces. Not only does China coddle solar firms, it inherently is a lower-cost manufacturing environment. Its cheap, simple solar panels are more marketable than the more sophisticated version attempted by Solyndra. Our subsidies for the purchase of solar panels are often used to buy Chinese products. Inevitably, the U.S. solar industry will seek to score the trifecta of government support already achieved by the boondoggle fuel ethanol — subsidizing its production, mandating its use, and barring its foreign competitors.

The stakes in the battle to manufacture solar panels are exceedingly small. Solar power accounts for less than 1 percent of the electricity generated in the United States. The Obama administration’s fervency for it has more to do with the romance of its clean, postindustrial image than with economics. Obama said last year, “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.” If that were so, it never would have needed half a billion of our dollars in the first place.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/276119/obama-s-enron-rich-lowry

Why is everyone trying to duck the facts. Nuclear fission power generation is the only practical alternative to burning hydrocarbons and polluting our atmosphere.

ruveyn

What do facts have to do with it? Symbolic pointless action is what wins hearts and minds. Something that actually works is not sexy.

Nuclear fusion is the only way to go using today's technology.

Uh are you talking about fission? We can't sustain a fusion reactor because it uses more energy to maintain the reaction than we get out of it.

Hah, this is such a fail for Americans in general. Pretend like it only affects the republicans and their Obama if you wish.

Nuclear fusion of a controlled sort has not been achieved in over 55 years of trying. Don't bet on its success. The only man made nuclear fusion that has worked is the explosion of thermonuclear bombs. Our best bet is to generate electricity using the advanced designs of fission reactors.

ruveyn

Wow, the solar companies created shell companies to buy and sell the same units of sunlight back and forth to give the illusion of a marketplace while committing fraud to drive up prices?

And then crashed and bankrupted the retirement funds of thousands of people, prompting the CEO to fake his own death?

I had no idea.

Yawn

We can use thermonuclear bombs to power the reactors.

That's not possible.

If we want to look to solar power, we'll have to invest in China's efforts. They're actually making it profitable with better quality panels that produce more watts per square inch, while driving down the price and mass producing them. I don't see solar as a replacement for the power grid, but if every home could produce 1 kilowatt, that would take some burden off of the mains, and it would probably drive the price down for electricity also.

I don't see a need for batteries either. Just plug a grid tie into your panel and when the sun shines lower your power bill. Who could argue with that?

No, we cannot. You have no idea what your are talking about. Thermonuclear bombs are triggered by small A-bombs. And they release all their energy in a very short time. Compare a stick of dynamite to a D-battery.

ruveyn

I actually do - very much - believe that solar will be the way of the future for household, business, and possibly auxilliary automotive input applications for collection and storage. It perhaps still needs a doubling or so but at current rates, within this decade it should start blowing up - especially if, as you said, China is able to bottom out the costs of making them.

The problem we and Spain had apparently is that when you try to get behind a technology that's perhaps close but not quite and then you try to shove your foot up its arse to make it go faster by throwing exorbitant amounts of money in. I remember Obama had that same idea with alternative fuel cars. The problem is if we decided to try to force Microsoft to make 8 GB RAM 3.5 Ghz processing 666Mhz bus PC's back in 1995 with the technology we had then - it would have been a colossal failure. It's kind of the same here. Solar - really good idea. Alternative electric/solar hybrid cars - also, really good idea. They're coming though. Consumer savviness is coming with them though, you're starting to get electric car prototypes now that actually look sexy and push out over 200 hp, I'm sure the next step with solar as well will be disguising its appearance, coming up with ways to make cells where they don't necessarily look like solar collectors.

Pretty sure that E85 ethanol fuel got it's big push during W's term.

Microsoft doesn't make PCs. At any rate there were faster computers in 1995 - they were just really expensive and didn't run Windows.

There's a conservation issue with solar cars - energy out can never be greater than energy in. the amount of sunlight hitting your car isn't enough to move it. Might charge the battery a little. Toyota uses it to run the fan in the air conditioning system.

Tesla has been making fast electric cars since the 90's. they are just really expensive.

The thing about solar collectors is that they work best when they absorb light. That puts some constraints on their color and finish.

E85 was the worst thing we ever did, don't know if this is just dogma I heard but, wasn't all the corn lost in the process and didn't we have bigger world food shortages starting than ever before? We were starving Africans for the sake of running our cars - which made it far far worse than just being an expensive and inefficient fuel.

When I mentioned Obama on cars though I was getting at the conversation he had back in his first year or so about trying to push the market toward electric, hybrid, etc. by government pressure or even government companies. That would have been a terrible idea in that directions.


Well, obviously there were mainframes, supercomputers, and minicomputers. That's why I knew I had to be more specific to say consumer market.


What's that talking about though, one-directional sunlight or all directions?


Yeah, I was watching that on How Its Made a couple nights ago. I think stuff like that leads the charge and lends the ideas people need if they, say, want to make something more like a G35 or G37.



This is one of the things (I think) that got me excited about solar to begin with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYy0beorZHk

To paraphrase, some of the big solar companies in the US have been able to provide close to or even slightly less than $2 per kilowatt hour. $ per kilowatt hour seems like its the big catch of the conversation and - unless this guy is is bigger, redder, and rounder than my eyes are catching ("Oh Yeahh!!") it all sounds both very plausible and very practical. Are you sure the rules of solar collection are quite as adversarial and unaccommodating as you've proposed?

There's nothing wrong with the internal combustion engine. Hybrids actually use slightly more energy during the lifetime of the vehicle than conventional fuel automobiles.

If you want to change the automotive industry, you start with natural gas vehicles. They burn cleaner which translates to lower repair costs, and "greener" technologies. The fuel is abundant and cheap and renewable. The infrastructure is already in place to process natural gas and distribute it on a large scale. We'll have to ditch fuel injection but that's not an issue with natural gas.

Electric is nice, but it's a toy. When you want to refuel, you want to do it within minutes, not hours, the market demands nothing less.

The environmentalists will be happy because we can sell natural gas cars as powered by cow farts.