October 21st, 2011 | by Susan Kraemer
With just 1.4% of its Recovery Act clean tech investments in "losers", it looks like the Obama administration is batting a much better average in "picking winners and losers" than the private Venture Capital (VC) market itself.
The US government guarantee of a private loan to Solyndra, at $535 million, represented a minuscule 1.4% of the Department of Energy investment in all renewable technologies. By contrast - VCs (who were out $1 billion to Solyndra, for example) expect much higher failure rates. Richard Stuebi, who advises VCs on expected green energy failure rates, says that just 3 in 10 successes represents a successful VC investment strategy. That is 70% losers - not 1.4%
October 8th, 2011 | by Zachary Shahan
Media Matters does a wonderful job of tracking what the media is talking about (or not). It recently showed the whoppingly warped media coverage of Solyndra compared to government corruption related to the Minerals Management Service (MMS) and a shocking military contracting waste and fraud report. Here are a few of their graphs on these topics
September 27th, 2011 | by Stephen Lacey
[T]he federal commitment to [oil & gas] was five times greater than the federal commitment to renewables during the first 15 years of each subsidies’ life, and it was more than 10 times greater for nuclear
September 26th, 2011 | by Susan Kraemer
The latest casualty of the Republican-held House, in its witch hunt against renewable energy, is a huge distributed solar project that would have doubled the number of solar rooftop installs in the US, while cutting electricity costs to practically nothing for hard-pressed military families, many of whom return home to lives of long term disability and resulting hardship.
In partnership with military housing developers, SolarCity was to have installed as many as 160,000 solar roofs on military family housing, supplying cheaper and cleaner electricity from their own roofs. Its SolarStrong military program
September 23rd, 2011 | by Zachary Shahan
Solyndra is the big cleantech story of the day again today for those outside (and some of those inside) the cleantech arena. We've been covering the story quite a bit lately, so if you want to read more from us on the matter, check out these solyndra stories. There's one thing, though, that I've mentioned but haven't dedicated a post to, so think I will quickly now
September 23rd, 2011 | by Stephen Lacey
Playing up the Solyndra bankruptcy to the highest political degree possible, Republicans are using their best rhetorical tricks. They have homed in on two phrases to describe loan guarantees — calling them a tool of “crony capitalism” and claiming that they allow the government “to pick winners and losers.”
September 21st, 2011 | by Susan Kraemer
The largest High Concentration Photovoltaic (HCPV) project in the world is being funded by the DOE with a $90 million loan guarantee for the Cogentrix Alamosa Solar Generating Project. The first 20 years of the electricity it will generate has already been bought under a PPA (power purchase agreement) by the Public Service Company of Colorado. More than 80 percent of its components will be sourced from the United States.
HCPV is new form of utility-scale solar that has barely been developed, but it has great potential because it has almost twice the efficiency of regular solar PV. Cogentrix HCPV is rated at 40% efficient. By comparison, most coal plants are typically rated at 30% efficiency.
The $90 million in funding represents the tail end of almost $40 billion in loan guarantees, loans, or conditional guarantees by the US Department of Energy (DOE) powered by the Obama administration stimulus Recovery Act.
One famously went bad, $0.5 billion to Solyndra. But the more than 40 DOE loan guarantees have
September 21st, 2011 | by Breath on the Wind
The Solar Industry is showing the highest growth, employment and innovation at a time when the balance of the country is not and media, focused on politics and Solyndra, suggests a weak or ailing industry that is being supported, against the public interest, only on the backs of government money.
September 20th, 2011 | by Guest Contributor
This is a full repost of a Media Matters article too good to pass up, especially since we continue to get inane comments here on CleanTechnica about it and I can only imagine how many people have been confused by the disinformers
September 20th, 2011 | by Stephen Lacey
Nobody likes to see $500 million in taxpayer funds lost. But as Congress investigates the loan guarantee given to the now-bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra, it’s important to put the failed loan into historical context
September 20th, 2011 | by Stephen Lacey
The Solyndra investigation has brought loan guarantees out of the obscure world of political wonkery and into the living rooms of Americans around the country.
The problem is, many in the media are completely misrepresenting how the instrument works and who supports it. So we’ve put together a video primer on how loan guarantees work, posted below
September 19th, 2011 | by DeSmog Blog
In her famous book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, author and activist Naomi Klein quotes the Godfather of free market capitalism, Milton Friedman, whom she credits with mainstreaming the "shock doctrine." Friedman stated:
"Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."
Under a textbook "shock doctrine" scenario as it pertains to the ongoing and escalating Solyndra Corporation hoopla, two U.S. Senators, sponsor David Vitter (R-LA) and co-sponsor Ron Johnson (R-WI), have introduced U.S. Senate Bill 1556, the Federal Accounting of Renewable Energy Act of 2011 (FARE) [PDF], or "FARE" as a direct response to the Solyndra saga — "ideas that are lying around," to quote Friedman
September 17th, 2011 | by Zachary Shahan
Here's yet another great response to the Solyndra debacle and all the attacks on clean energy and green jobs that have followed. It's part of an email I received from the Natural Resources Defense Council last night. Check it out (and please share it)
September 16th, 2011 | by Zachary Shahan
"The solar company Solyndra filed for bankruptcy last month, which media reports have depicted as the end of solar power in the U.S. This is like saying there is no future for the internet because Netscape went out of business."
Love this. This is the intro to a great email I received from Vote Solar yesterday. There's more worth sharing, and it was really so well-written I don't see the point in changing or adding much, so here's more
September 15th, 2011 | by Stephen Lacey
It’s often claimed that the Solyndra loan guarantee was “rushed through” by the Obama Administration for political reasons. In fact, the Solyndra loan guarantee was a multi-year process that the Bush Administration launched in
