Who would have guessed? Solyndra, the green energy company that received a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, is sadly no more. Even more tragic is that $500,000,000.00 taxpayer dollars were wasted in anticipation of results that could only be described as miraculous:
Chris Gronet, the founder and chairman of Solyndra, said the guaranteed funding “will enable Solyndra to achieve the economies of scale needed to deliver solar electricity at prices that are competitive with utility rates.” He added, “This expansion is really about creating new jobs while meaningfully impacting global warming.”
Cheap power? New jobs? Solve global warming? He forgot to add “will cure cancer.”
Sound vaguely familiar? It might if you ever read Gulliver’s travels. George Will referenced the relevant passage back in 2009.
Gulliver’s travels took him to the Academy of Lagado, where “professors contrive new rules and methods” for everything: “One man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last forever without repairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundredfold more than they do at present.” There was, however, the “inconvenience” that “none of these projects” had yet come to fruition and “the whole country lies miserably waste.” But “instead of being discouraged,” people were “fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes,” which included “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.”
(emphasis mine)
Gronet was not alone in breathless praise for the venture. President Obama called it “a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism.”
Ah, the dangers of utopianism. And people wonder why trust in government is at a record low.
Who were the early skeptics? National Review’s Greg Pollowitz for one. He rang alarm bells as early as March 2009.
It should be noted that this “investment” has been under investigation since May. This from ABC:
The Obama administration bypassed procedural steps meant to protect taxpayers as it hurried to approve an energy loan guarantee to a politically-connected California solar power startup, ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News have learned.
On a related note, there are now 6,928,000,000,000 cubic meters of commercially recoverable natural gas reserves in the U.S. 100 years worth at least. If you want to see true example of “American ingenuity”, check out the Texans at Mitchell Energy who invented Fracking.
1 response so far ↓
1 Steve Roth // Sep 25, 2011 at 8:39 am
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/the-solyndra-scandal/
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