OK, I’m doing my top 10 list now. Following up on AWEA’s top 10 wind energy stories and SEIA’s top 10 solar energy stories, I decided I may as well give my own opinion on the top 10 clean energy stories and energy efficiency stories of 2011 (plus one … [continued]
Some more good cleantech stories of the pastw week or so: 1. The City 2.0 Wins 2012 TED Prize. For the first time, the TED prize didn’t go to a person but to an idea. Of course, City 2.0 includes a lot of cleantech and other green-friendly features. 2. … [continued]
SolarCity and BoA-Merrill Lynch announced that they have agreed to terms on financing SolarStrong, a billion-plus dollar SolarCity project – the largest in US history – that could double the number of residential solar installations in the US by installing solar power systems on privatized US military housing communities across the country.
The global supply of polysilicon is hurtling towards 500,000 tons by 2014, almost doubling today’s supply within 2 years, from 266,000 tons this year, analysts at Macquarie Group Ltd have told Bloomberg News. The ricochet in solar prices as demand and supply have in turn pushed and pulled at the solar … [continued]
I was holding out on writing yet another Solyndra story, but looks like I’m giving in. Steven Chu, the U.S. Secretary of Energy and a Nobel Prize winner in physics, was hounded by Republican Congressmen for 5 and a half hours, twice as long as BP’s Tony Hayward was grilled … [continued]
The NY Times’ reporting on the California Solar Valley Ranch project and clean energy subsidies is so full of holes that NRG has issued a point-by-point rebuttal. The NYT article is symptomatic of the ugly, protracted decline of mainstream journalism in the US.
The Obama administration had set a goal, for the public good, of cutting solar costs to $1 a watt installed by 2016.
The reason that the Obama Department of Energy invested a half million in backing some of the private VC loans (which totaled $1 billion) to Solyndra was that the company had a way to bring down the cost of solar.
The unique solar panel they made was key to this effort. Note that the Solyndra roof (pictured) is quite different from the typical solar roof. That difference is key. Solyndra wasn’t just another solar panel manufacturer, making just another thing that could be more cheaply made in China.
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%.
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:
[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.
