Energy Secretary Steven Chu has just about had it with House Republican accusations about Solyndra and other clean-energy companies that won billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees.
“After hundreds of thousands of pages of documents sent over, there’s not any whiff that this was a politically influenced decision,” Chu told reporters Tuesday shortly after wrapping up House committee testimony on the controversial program. “That’s true of all the loans.”
The Obama administration’s scandal-plagued loan guarantee to Solyndra Corp. has made federal support for renewable energy projects in general a political target for Republicans. Already the Republican-leaning Crossroads GPS group is running ads calling the president’s green-energy program a “disgrace” and calling on Congress to “shut it down.”
But the Crossroads ads also strain the facts. For example, they cite an inflated figure for the Obama administration’s loan guarantees and grants to “clean energy” firms owned by Obama campaign backers. The figure came from a conservative author, but Crossroads misleadingly attributes it to a respected news magazine.
Solyndra, a California-based solar panel manufacturer, declared bankruptcy in August 2011 after having received $528 million in federal loan guarantees.
The loan guarantees, part of the 2009 stimulus package, were the first to be allocated out of the $18 billion Congress has committed to dole out. But the failure of Solyndra — which could cost taxpayers more than a half-billion dollars — has renewed the highly partisan debate in Washington over the benefits or failings of Mr. Obama’s stimulus program and the wisdom of clean energy subsidies in general.
Solyndra’s problem, according to outsiders, was that the product looked better when it was conceived than when it hit the market. Solyndra’s design avoided the use of silicon, a commodity that was selling at very high prices in 2009 when the loan guarantee was approved but that since crashed.
The design also sought to cut costs with an innovative cylindrical design that reduced the labor required for installation. But the capital costs for manufacturing were high. At the same time, Chinese companies had ramped up their output, flooding the market and pushing down the price of solar equipment at a time when slack demand in Europe contributed to a surplus.
Solyndra became one of the administration’s most costly fumbles after the company declared bankruptcy, laid off 1,100 workers and was raided by F.B.I. agents seeking evidence of possible fraud.
Although the government in such programs typically guarantees loans made to a company by a commercial bank, this was not the case for Solyndra. It 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 it had received $528 million before going under.
The Solyndra loan guarantee was the Obama administration’s first. The administration, seeking to forge a “clean energy” economy and provide jobs in the face of a growing recession, picked the project partly because it was what government officials were then fond of calling “shovel ready.”
Resources:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74252.html#ixzz1t9UldJdx
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/solyndra/index.html
http://eastcountymagazine.org/node/8719
After that, we studied and learnt there about wind and solar energy. We gathered a wide range of information about sustainable energy resources. As we know, wind power is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the United States. Therefore, we also learnt about how a wind turbine works, how some of the trade-offs surrounding wind energy, and how scientists are engineering new. We also learnt in the MOS about the most efficient ways to generate, store, and transport electricity from the wind.
We also came to know that the Museum has developed a to-scale community solar system model that spans as far as the Riverside MBTA station. We also done a little experiment there whose outcomes proved that in order for a panel to collect the highest amount of solar energy, the photovoltaic panel must be place in coordination to the incoming angle of the Sun.
