Posted on 09/01/2011 5:37:27 AM PDT by Palmetto Patriot
Solyndra, a manufacturer of solar panels, is bankrupt, which is inconvenient for the Obama administration, which extended half a billion dollars’ worth of loan guarantees to the firm as part of the president’s stimulus effort. The inconvenience extends to the 1,100 Solyndra employees who have just lost their jobs and to the U.S. taxpayers who may be on the hook for the bankrupt firm’s loans. The project was indeed “shovel ready,” as the president likes to put it; unhappily, in this case, the shovel belongs to the gravedigger. Perhaps the gravestone could read: “Another project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”
Solyndra was an irrestibly juicy piece of bait for stimulus-happy progressives. President Obama, like all Democrats, labors under a special challenge when it comes to economic affairs: His economically illiterate base spends its time decrying “corporations,” but urban-gardening cooperatives don’t create a lot of jobs, and community-based nonprofits by definition don’t create any profit, and therefore no investment capital, and therefore no economic growth. You want to see some real, sustainable, long-term jobs created, your best bet is to look to a “corporation”—“corporation” simply being the word for a business that has grown large enough or profitable enough to require the legal organization of its affairs. But if you’re Barack Obama, not just any corporation will do: It has to be just the right sort of corporation.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
"So, the indictment reads: wasteful, inefficient, non-transparent, irregular, unseemly, and, finally, bankrupt. The thousands of jobs the Solyndra project was supposed to create have not appeared, and more than a thousand jobs have just disappeared. The president is planning a big speech about jobs, and perhaps he’s had enough law-school Latin to know what mea culpa means."
For the smartest man in the world, Obama sure seems to be an idiot.
I’d like to see an accounting for the $535,000,000(in one article) given to this “company” by the regime. I suspect some of it is in personal, offshore banking accounts, who knows where it all is/went.
As government projects go, this one was a bargain~!
It only cost a half a million per job~!
Solar is not bad if you scale back the expectations. Solar costs about $1 per watt of power to install. The only place in the country that it really makes sense to use solar is Hawaii where people are paying $0.42 kWh for electricity. The most you can really get is about 250 watts per panel, which is not a lot.
Then there is the issue of what to do with the suff when it goes bad, because it will go bad in about 20 years. You also have to replace the inverter in about 15 years.
It’s a fact - the Chinese can use exactly the same technology, produce the panels for MUCH less, ship them from China to the US, and still deeply undercut the price of the US-made product.
If I-Phones were made in this country, they wold cost approximately $2,000 apiece.
Once, we could make the high-tech stuff, and sell it elsewhere in the world for less than the relatively unsophisticated manufacturing bases in other countries, maintaining a lead that previously, nobody else could keep up with. Innovation fed by incentive was the “magic touch” that made the flux capacitor possible, and thus time travel.
Doesn’t ANYBODY remember “Back to the Future”?
I don’t believe the average consumer wants to mess with solar when electricity works just fine.
Oh, he knows what it means. The problem is, as a classic narcissist, he full well believes that it does not pertain to him.
Maybe it was all on the up and up and it was just a matter of a really bad business idea. Whatever, we deserve an investigation of how the money was spent or wasted!
For all those jobs lost & taxpayer money wasted, you can bet the executives of the company have been living large & will exit the company with a wad of cash & assets. These same execs will then donate a portion of that money to Obama’s reelection, & the cycle will be complete.
Another shining example of liberal corruption at work.
In other words, Rush is right, it’s a money laundering operation.
True, but you can get a payback since there is a 30% tax credit and the utility companies will buy back the power in some cases. If it makes money and there is a payback, then it makes sense to do it. You have to crunch the numbers.
Actually they did. When they tried to raise money through an IPO and failed, they sent half of the manufacturing to China. I would imagine that the Chinese operations will continue since the US taxpayers bought them a new factory to use to compete against us.
this one, GM, Chrysler....more..
If I-Phones were made in this country, they wold cost approximately $2,000 apiece.
I was thinking about the two products you mentioned.
Both technologies were developed in the West (US, mainly).
Both are almost exclusively produced in Asia (China, mainly).
Yet, solar companies are going bankrupt left and right, but Apple is wildly successful, so much so that it was recently the world's largest corporation by market capitalization.
Solar companies seem to exist only because they are directly subsidized by governments, and their products are subsidized through the tax system.
Apple receives no such government support. Their products are well received in the marketplace because they fulfill the wants and needs of consumers better than their competitors.
One of the main reasons solar companies are failing is that the subsidies they receive are being cut, particularly in Europe, as austerity is forcing governments there to cut budgets.
If austerity comes to America, solar companies will be pressured even more.
Not even the strategy of moving to China will save them, because, without subsidies, there will be no demand for their product, and they cannot exist.
Apple products, on the other hand, enjoy the support of the consumer, and should continue to stand on their own.
That's the problem with it. There's no question that the cost of making the panels will continue to drop, but, unless, there's a change in the laws of physics, we'll never be able to increase the amount of energy the Sun sends down.
I think the things are great for supplemental power on a house or office building -- but only if they're installed without my money. Using them as central powerplants is just daffy.
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