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As the Second Half of yesterday's Super Bowl game was into its second series of downs half the stadium mysteriously lost power and the game had to be delayed almost 40 minutes.… Players on both sides killed time by stretching and passing the ball while commentators talked their way through an outage. In the end it was some sort of surge which blew a circuit breaker, but the complicated lighting system of the Superdome takes a long time to "reboot." One interesting part of the story is that on Super Bowl Sunday the Department of Energy posted a story bragging...

School districts that do not provide deaf students "a visual cue" alongside a starter pistol to enable them to compete on the track team or create basketball and tennis leagues for students in wheelchairs will be in violation of federal law and could lose government funding. On Friday, the Obama administration declared disabled students "have the right" to "an equal opportunity to participate in their schools' extracurricular activities." In essence, the Obama administration established the right for disabled students to play wheelchair basketball or wheelchair tennis. The U.S. Department of Education sent a guidance letter to schools, school districts, and...

A top Nissan official has said the company was “arrogant” in its marketing and sales approach for the all-electric Leaf, which received a $1.4 billion stimulus loan guarantee fromPresident Obama’s Department of Energy. Not that the company is going to return taxpayers their money, since the premise upon which Nissan received the loan were ridiculously high production estimates. Too much in expenses would have to be eaten otherwise. “We were a little bit arrogant as a manufacturer when we went to the 50-state rollout,”said Al Castignetti, Nissan’s vice president for sales, to Automotive News in late November. “We had assumed...

SolarCity US DOE loan approval fails According to news reports, US-based solar installation firm, SolarCity will not be able to complete and comply with documentation deadlines of September 30th to be considered for a US Department of Energy loan, previously announced. Earlier this month, the DOE had made a conditional commitment for a partial loan guarantee to SolarCity for PV system installations on residential and other buildings at US military bases. The US$344 million loan would go towards 371MW of new solar power generation capacity. The project, code named SolarStrong, will be led by SolarCity, with USRG Renewable Finance acting...

Solar panel installer SolarCity said on Friday it was the second company in as many days that will not get finalization of U.S. government loan aid by a September 30 deadline. The Department of Energy informed SolarCity of its inability to close the loan 48 hours ago, blaming increased paperwork resulting from a Congressional investigation into the Department of Energy's $535 million loan guarantee awarded to bankrupt solar company Solyndra, SolarCity said in a letter to the Republican lawmakers heading the probe.The DOE loan guarantee program, which is under fire for missing signs its first recipient of loan aid, Solyndra,...

  (Source: inautonews.com) A123 could lose the rest of its $249 million grant We can put this under the "Duh" files: A123 Systems won't receive the remaining amount of its federal grant if Wanxiang Group is approved as the new owner. According to Reuters, which spoke to an unnamed official from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the DOE will cut A123 off from its $249 million grant the company received in 2009. A123 has only used $133 million of the grant so far. The official, who noted that all parties were aware of this consequence during last weekend's auction of A123, said...

You won´t hear much about it elsewhere today. But from some downtown Chicago law offices will come the distinct sound of one more nail being driven into the coffin of Barack Obama´s green energy giveaway loans. A123 Systems will be auctioned off. It´s a Michigan lithium ion battery maker which declared bankruptcy back in October,the same day it cashed another $1 million check from the crack Obama investment team. A123 is one of those notorious bad bets like Solyndra that the Obama administration poured billions offices taxpayer dollars into.… A123, an 11-year-old firm founded to manufacture batteries for electric cars...

Whether you like it or not, you are an investor in the electric vehicle (EV) battery of tomorrow. Late last week, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend $120 million to establish a major battery research center at the Argonne National Lab outside of Chicago. The stated goal: to create a new “Manhattan Project” that will develop an EV battery in the next five years that lasts five times as long and costs one-fifth as much as current EV batteries. And they say it’s all in the interest of national security. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR)...

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- A new California innovation accelerator for energy storage firms is getting a "fresh charge," thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy. CalCharge – a partnership between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CalCEF, a family of nonprofit organizations working to promote the transition to a clean energy economy-- will play a central role in the newly announced Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), the latest U.S. Department of Energy Innovation Hub. JCESR, led by Argonne National Laboratory in Indiana, will combine the R&D power of five DOE national laboratories, five universities, and four...

A reply by stimulus recipient ($115 million of a $249 million grant paid out)A123 Systems to an inquiry by Republican Sens.Charles Grassley (Iowa) andJohn Thune (S.D.) showed theelectric vehicle battery manufacturer received nearly $1 million in Recovery Act funds on the day it declared bankruptcy. The money flow is not likely to stop. A123 as a whole, or in pieces, is going to be sold to the court-approved buyer(s). That is likely to be eitherJohnson Controls, which is the lead bidder for the company’s automotive business, or Wanxiang Group, which wants to buy the whole company. A123 had an agreement...

The venture finance operation that raised money for crony capitalist investorsKleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, and their green tech firms like electric car companyFisker Automotive ($193 million paid in stimulus loan guarantees) and fuel cell manufacturerBloom Energy, is shutting down, according to a Fortune report. Advanced Equities, Inc. had recently been reprimanded by the Securities and Exchange Commission and by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for misleading investors and for breach of contract with its brokers. Fortune cited sources that said AEI brokers were told last week that Monday would be their last day. Crain’s Chicago Business confirmed that...

...CompleteColorado.com has obtained emails that seem to directly contradict Plouffe’s answer, and also challenge the President’s notion that the DOE’s loan decisions were universally autonomous within the agency. The emails also lend even more credence to the theory that the loan to Abound Solar was political payback to Colorado’s wealthy Democratic benefactor and Gang-of-Four member, Pat Stryker.

As Bloomberg reported today , stimulus-funded electric vehicle battery maker A123 Systems filed bankruptcy in federal court after failing to make a debt payment that was due. Milwaukee Business Times has reported that Johnson Controls will purchase the “automotive business assets” of A123 for $125 million, and that A123 will receive from Johnson $72.5 million in “debtor in possession” financing to continue operating during the sale process. Regular readers won’t be surprised, as the company’s gradual sink to its current depths – despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers – has been covered by NLPC since late...

As the now-bankrupt stimulus loan recipient Abound Solar filed for Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy in early July thanks largely to its defective modules, theDepartment of Energy still praised the company’s work as “innovative” and cost competitive, all while it blamed Abound’s failure on China for dumping underpriced panels on the market. And now, despite the fact that Abound no longer exists, DOE is still withholding public information about the company because it claims it would harm the inactive business’s competitive edge by disclosing trade secrets. The Daily Caller reported last week that the company sold defective or underperforming products, and...

The federal government is making another big bet on solar panel manufacturing with taxpayer money, hoping the third time will be the charm. SoloPower held its grand opening Thursday in Portland, Ore., with speeches from local politicians and a ribbon-cutting. "It really revolutionizes rooftop applications, and it makes solar both easy and cost effective for nearly any commercial and industrial building worldwide," CEO Tim Harris said. SoloPower closed on a guaranteed government loan of $197 million last August, about the time another solar panel manufacturer, Solyndra, filed for bankruptcy. The failure of Solyndra cost U.S. taxpayers more than a half-billion...

In a first for any American public school system, education officials in the District of Columbia have set new achievement targets for students based on race and income with lower goals for black, Hispanic and poor kids and higher ones for whites and Asians. Washington D.C. officials are simply following a national trend implemented by the Obama Administration, which is paying states to adopt different education achievement goals for different groups of children. The administration is just “trying to be realistic about what’s achievable,” according to a U.S. Department of Education (DOE) official quoted in the mainstream newspaper that reported...

Many Americans were upset when solar-panel maker Solyndra filed for bankruptcy last September owing taxpayers more than $500 million, but retiree Robert Grady Jr. was different. The more he read about the failed company, the more irritated he became. Finally, weeks after the bankruptcy case began, Mr. Grady did something he’d never done before. He filed a claim in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. It turned out to be the biggest single claim in the case — $535 million — but it wasn’t on behalf of himself. Rather, Mr. Grady, 57, made the claim on behalf of U.S. taxpayers because he said...

Dem lawmaker slams Issa for sending US Marshals to serve subpoenasBy Ben Geman - 09/11/12 10:08 AM ET Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) says House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is conducting his probe of federal green energy project loans with bullying tactics and November’s elections in mind. Cummings, the panel’s top Democrat, sent Issa a letter Monday slamming a dozen subpoenas issued last week to current and former Energy Department employees and contractors, which included use of armed U.S. Marshals to serve subpoenas at the Energy Department (DOE). The Maryland Democrat called it “intimidation,” and said...

Two weeks ago the mainstream and clean tech advocacy media proclaimed that taxpayer-subsidized, failing electric vehicle battery maker A123 Systems would be saved by a deal with a Chinese company. Since then the Massachusetts-based manufacturer’s stock price sank below what had been its previous low of 44 cents. This morning it is down to 38 cents, and yesterday the company received a delisting notice from the NASDAQ. So what happened? There could be several reasons why the recipient of hundreds of millions of U.S. stimulus dollars hasn’t impressed Wall Street with its pending bailout from Wanxiang Group. The deal is...

The Department of Energy announced the distribution of $43 million in funding for the development of energy storage technology that is “too risky for private-sector investment.” The Aug. 2 press release said the recipients were chosen through two programs of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy – the Advanced Management and Protection of Energy Storage Devices (AMPED) and Small Business Innovation Research (STTR). “ARPA-E was launched in 2009 to seek out transformational, breakthrough technologies that are too risky for private-sector investment but have the potential to translate science into quantum leaps in energy technology, form the foundation for entirely new industries,...