Yes, More Solyndras for Clean Energy (Vacation on Planet Gore Alert)

If at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again.

This article is a blueprint of the 0bama 2013 economic recovery legislation. You can't say you weren't warned.

...so when evil bankers go broke and need bailouts it’s outrageous and evil.

When green companies go broke and get bailouts - hey it happens.

Our system is completely corrupt. Thank you for not caring. :)

Speculating in the alternative energy industry with taxpayer money is hard to defend.

“reasonable risk”= 1.3 million in lobbying/donations for 500 million in porkulus.

I’d say there’s “no risk”.

This shows a clear distinction between how things are done as political payoffs vs. how things are done if you want results.

Obama and company decided to pay off some of their cronies, so they offered them big bucks to make “green” technologies, and, of course, they produced nothing.

Compare that to two things the Pentagon wanted during the W. Bush years. The first was a known quantity.

The Pentagon just came out and said, “We want another big production of M1911A1 pistols for us to buy.” Didn’t give anybody a thin dime to do it. Soon, every US gun maker, large and small, was producing their own version of M1911A1, with some tiny little jigger that would make it unique to them.

The end result was that the Pentagon got its guns, and every other company retailed its guns on the market, which snapped them up at normal prices.

But that is known technology. The Pentagon then came out and said, “We want to buy a bunch of small UAVs”. And soon every large company and start up that was anything like a company that would do that, was producing a hundred different UAVs. All sorts of models, all new technology.

And while the Pentagon only got a few, there are now little UAVs all over the market, from toys to very useful gizmos that do all sorts of things.

So the lesson here is that you don’t start by offering money to a few cronies to create new technologies. Instead you let all the creativity of the market produce the technologies, that you can then pick and choose from.

And importantly, instead of just the technologies you chose, in the process many other technologies are created that even if you don’t want them, somebody else very well might.

I have the answer: All green investment money must come from union pension funds.

All tax increases are only on democrats.

Obamacare should be tried on only government workers first.

Liberals can only purchase energy not made from coal, nuclear, or any fossil fuel. Nor can they buy anything made of plastic.

Liberal billionaires should be taxed 75% and 100% death tax.

Leave the rest of us alone to build stuff.

Grunwald’s propaganda is the usual pitch to the naive. There are hundreds of Solyndras who need only find a politically connected sponsor to obtain federal grants. This is an old game and John Holdren with Steve Chu are old professionals at this business. It is part of why Holdren was not associated with engineering when he was a UC Berkeley professor. It is possible because of "elasticity" in the energy business, and ignorance of the public. It is no suprise that few understand how diffuse solar energy is, and why it will never be an efficient source of high-quality energy - electricity. The sun - sunshine, playgrounds, vacaction, beaches - sounds wholesome and safe. But solar installations have killed and injured an enormously larger number, even with their relative scarcity, than commercial nuclear power generation, which has never killed anyone, nor incurred radiation injury. Thousands have fallen off of roofs working on collectors resulting in hundreds of deaths over ten years.

Anyone familiar with Silicon Valley and its technology knows that low-value “fabs” are off shore. Only prototypes can be built in California, and that is rare. That is why social media technology is the only growth sector in California, and Facebook shows the fragility of that business. Social media are about marketing and advertising. It is no surprise that they manage to get attention. Solyndra, with its hundreds of thousands of square feet for manufacturing was a scam from the start. Savvy investors know they can cover their founder's investment during the IPO, and know that government guarantees should protect them from losses. Not incidentally, Solyndra's large investors were also bundlers for Obama. (For real insight into the crony capitalist world read Peter Schweiker's book "Throw the Bums Out".)

Remember, Silicon Valley is the home of Kleiner Perkins, Al Gore's honeypot once the federal government locked in the legislation to steal more money from naive taxpayers with the carbon credit boondoggle. California, seeing the many states balk at supporting another mysterious tax, one which doesn't appear directly on invoices, but which is entirely controlled by crony capitalist legislators and their really wealthy partners who become lobbyists, initiated its own carbon credit program. Bankruptcies in Roseville or Fresno mean nothing to the doyens in Pacific Heights, Atherton, La Jolla, or Hollywood.

Without burying those with little background in materials science or power engineering, the issue is that under the best circumstances, clear, low-humidity, summer days, about ten watts of electricity can be generated for 6 hours each day by each square meter of collector. A little multiplication shows why solar electric energy can not compete, except for high-value, low power applications, like emergency phones in the middle of a desert. A medium sized nuclear plant generates a million kilowatts. Thus one hundred million square meters of collector could, assuming no storage or transmission losses, produce one quarter (remember, about 6 hours of usable solar energy) generated with over 95 percent uptime. If the numbers are daunting, that amounts to about four hundred million square meters of collecter area, minimum, to replace a single nuclear plant, one about half the size of one of the Fukushima plants, all of which experienced an enormous earthquate and tsunami, and caused no deaths or injuries - the "Fukushima Disaster" - and never released hyrdrocarbon emmissions or contributed to "global warming" during their forty years of operation. Solar electric is a polemical device, almost snake oil, because, while it could be built, the cost would accelerate the economic failure of capitalism - which is the objective behind forcing solar, wind, biomass, etc, upon a naive public.

Time. Nice try HIDING THE DECLINE. Did you ever see the Fremont Plant. It is not far behind the TAJ MAHAL in construction costs. Way over the top. A new company did not need to spend this kind of money on a risky venture, as you call it. THE FOREIGNER should stay of of business ventures he knows nothing about. He wasted taxpayers money to try and gain political points with the leftist environmentalists and you can’t spin it any other way. They had a plant 1/4 mile away that could have been used or they could have easily rented space in the area if sales increased beyond their capacity.

My business partner attended a private lunch with Chu for Chinese American potential donors a couple of years ago, and asked him how he saw the potential for solar energy.

Chu's reply struck him cold: "The only long term solution to energy is nuclear."

My partner's take-away was that all this solar stuff for Chu was just a way to generate jobs to cite at the next election. They just didn't plan on the solars' demise coming so soon.