His administration has reenergized the same loan program that caused the Obama administration debacle.
A little over a year after Obama’s visit, the firm shut down its hi-tech cylindrical photovoltaic fabrication plant and laid off most of its 1,100 workforce. Then it filed for bankruptcy and was raided by the FBI.
Could it be that Americans want to preserve an energy system that has made their country the greatest in the world and makes everyday living convenient and economical? Could it be they are fully aware that an all-EV America is an impossibility? Could it be that, even should America achieve the Biden administration’s fanciful goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, the world’s temperature will hardly budge — if it budges at all? (Watch Sen. John Kennedy’s amusing interchange with Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk.)
https://spectator.org/solyndra-on-steroids-bidens-latest-green-energy-scheme/
by TOM RAABE
In a move eerily reminiscent of the failed Solyndra, President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy has doled out massive loans in green energy initiatives to corporations.
READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Climate Alarmists Swing From Megadrought to El Niño
Remember Solyndra? Way back in 2009, the administration of Barack Obama, newly inaugurated and stoked with the ideological fire of environmental zeal, greenlit a $535 million loan guarantee to a company by that name to mass produce easy-to-install cylindrical solar units.
It was the poster child of Obama’s initiative to grow clean-tech jobs, the model for his administration’s effort to pump $80 billion into the green energy sector. To plump the program, the president made a flashy appearance at Solyndra’s factory in Fremont, California, just months prior to the 2010 midterms, saying that investing in clean energy is “the right thing to do for our environment, it’s the right thing to do for our national security, but it’s also the right thing to do for our economy.”
For American taxpayers, though, investing in Solyndra was the wrong thing to do. A little over a year after Obama’s visit, the firm shut down its hi-tech cylindrical photovoltaic fabrication plant and laid off most of its 1,100 workforce. Then it filed for bankruptcy and was raided by the FBI. Left holding a bag with $535 million in it were those same American taxpayers.
An investigation completed years later found that Solyndra had provided the government with “false and misleading information during the application process” and “that the actions of certain Solyndra officials were, at best, reckless and irresponsible or, at worst, an orchestrated effort to knowingly and intentionally deceive and mislead the Department.” It also discovered that the Energy Department’s “due diligence efforts were less than fully effective…. the Department missed opportunities to detect and resolve indicators that portions of the data provided by Solyndra were unreliable.” According to another report, one of the private investors backing the project was a big Obama fund-raising bundler.
It has also come out that White House insiders had warned the president beforehand of the perils of the Solyndra deal, telling him the company’s cost structure was unsound. But so great was his environmental ardor — or political ambition — that he ignored the advice and made the trip anyway.
The deal was a disaster all around — economically and politically.
Billions in Green Corporate Welfare
The government office that financed the Solyndra debacle is still around, now bigger, more aggressive, and much wealthier than it was then.
Founded in 2005 to pump up green energy with low-interest loans to environmental entrepreneurs, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has languished for a decade and a half — practically mothballed during the Trump years — until 2021, when Biden assumed office. Compliments of his “Trillions in Government Spending Reduces Inflation Act” (aka the Inflation Reduction Act), Biden pumped $350 billion into the office’s previous loan authority of $44 billion, and the office now has $394 billion to throw at green-energy firms to work toward the carbon-neutral-nation utopia.
Overseeing the cascade of money is Jigar Shah, who earned his environmental bona fides co-helming a start-up solar-energy firm called SunEdison in 2003. Under Shah, the loan office will be financing the usual green projects — car-battery research, wind, and solar research — but it will also be pumping money into less mainstream endeavors, like producing hydrogen from natural gas, mining lithium, and producing graphite, an often-overlooked mineral used in rechargeable car batteries.
Already out Shah’s door is $9.2 billion, sent to Ford Motor Company to build EV battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky. This marks the largest allotment of department largesse so far, and it has met with unlikely opposition — from the unions.
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