loan guarantees

Yikes! Darrell Issa Doesn’t Know Difference between Tax Credits & Loan Guarantees

12 years ago slacey 10 Comments

What’s the only thing worse than turning a Congressional investigation into a months-long political circus? The leaders of that investigation not having a firm grasp of the policies they’re supposed to be examining.

California Republican Darrell Issa chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, one of the top bodies responsible for looking into the loan guarantee to the now-bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra. So you’d think that Mr. Issa would, after almost four months of investigation, be able to distinguish the extraordinary differences between a tax credit and a loan guarantee.

$6 Million More Spent on Bogus Solyndra Ads

12 years ago slacey 1 Comment

The Koch-funded political advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity is unleashing another multi-million campaign to play up the Solyndra bankruptcy in key election states.

After the release of 180,000 pages of documents and months of a heavily-politicized Congressional investigation that included testimony from Energy Secretary Steven Chu, there is still no evidence that the loan guarantee issued to the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra was a political favor, or that any official in the Administration did anything illegal. […]

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

13 years ago 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