Solyndra

Another “Solyndra” Project Sacrificed in Republican Attack on FEMA

15 years susan 16 Comments

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…

Why Would Obama Highlight Solyndra?

15 years Z. S. 11 Comments

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…

New Kind of 40% Efficient Solar Farm Gets $90 Million DOE Loan Guarantee to Cogentrix

15 years susan 8 Comments

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

FARE — Shock Doctrine in Action

15 years DeSmog Blog 0 Comments

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.