Free Republic

As more solar farms arise in the sunny corners of the U.S., it’s inevitable that solar developers will have to play ball with environmentalists. First Solar and SunPower announced an agreement with the environmental groups to add thousands of acres near their projects for wildlife protection. As more solar farms arise in the sunny corners of the U.S., it’s inevitable that solar developers will have to play ball with environmental groups. First Solar and SunPower announced an agreement on Tuesday with the Sierra Club and others to add thousands of acres near their proposed projects for wildlife protection. The agreement...

It took President Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney to shock me to my senses. As someone who favors cutting government spending on clean energy and eliminating government subsidies in general, I was particularly distressed to learn (in Carney’s words) that “I am “aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy not to know and understand that clean energy technologies are going to play a huge role in the 21st century.” Even worse, I learn that “I have a severely diminished capacity to understand what drives economic growth in industrialized countries in this century.” And I had thought that if clean...

Complete title: Judicial Watch, Human Events Sue Obama Administration for Records Detailing Bailout Loan to California Solar Manufacturer Heavily in Debt$1.2 Billion in Loan Guarantees to SunPower from Department of Energy Followed Successful Lobbying Campaign by Firm Connected to California Congressman’s Son (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch, the organization that investigates and fights government corruption, announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on February 1, 2012, against the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of the Treasury for records regarding a controversial $1.2 billion government loan guarantee from the Obama Department of...

Yesterday, another shoe dropped in the chronicles of the Obama administration’s crony capitalism. A start-up electric car company with ties to Al Gore got a $529 million loan guarantee from Obama’s Department of Energy to build luxury electric cars...in Finland! Leaving aside the fact that to date only two of these $97,000 cars have been sold (one of them to a movie star), we might at least hope that this ridiculous exercise in the government picking winners minus any competitive, transparent process (Al Gore’s venture cap firm) and losers (the taxpayers subsidizing a car no one wants) would produce manufacturing jobs in the...

The Obama Administration spent nearly half of the $38.6 billion ($17.2 billion) set aside for his green energy programs and was only able to create 3,545 permanent green jobs. This comes out to a staggering $4,853,000 per job. Now we find out that the Obama Energy Department is going back and changing solar energy press releases. CNBC reported: Someone affiliated with the Department of Energy has been going back to make changes to press releases posted on the Internet weeks and months ago, CNBC has found. The changes occurred in two press releases from the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee...

Americans need to know why the Energy Department approved a loan guarantee for Solyndra when the company was so clearly troubled. But politicizing this mess to smear the entire renewable energy industry won't help the country or the jobless. This industry is estimated to have doubled its number of American jobs in the past two years. Demonizing it could cripple its job-creating potential. San Jose's SunPower is the latest victim. Fox News has made a series of outrageous claims about it, calling its $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee a scandal "bigger than Solyndra." This is utterly baseless. Fox, without a...

With the Solyndra scandal already beyond the boiling point, the Department of Energy pushed through nearly $6 billion more in green energy loans in the final hours of the maligned program.  One of those was to another California based company, SunPower, who just three weeks earlier had publicly announced plans to build its 320,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Mexico.  The Mexico plant will produce solar panels to be shipped back to California for a proposed "solar ranch" in San Luis Obispo County that will have a grand total of 15 permanent presumably American jobs.  That works out to $82.6...

With the Solyndra scandal still swirling, the Obama administration is under pressure to reveal the financial condition of the solar companies that received $4.75 billion in similar federal loan guarantees on the last day of the program. Republican lawmakers on two House committees are seeking details about the loans given to First Solar, SunPower Corp. and ProLogis. Of those three companies, troubling financial revelations have emerged about SunPower, which received a $1.2 billion loan, more than twice the money approved for Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy last month after receiving a $528 million loan. The Energy Department says on its...

Congressman's Son Lobbied For Failing Solar Panel Company How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project. The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra...

How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project. The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain. Two men with insight into the process...

How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project. The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain. Two men with insight into the process...

How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project. The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain. Two men with insight into the process...

Happy Monday, Obama administration. According to a new tranche of emails obtained by ABC News, the political wreckage of the Solyndra scandal could get significantly more grisly before all is said and done. In one particularly incriminating note, a staffer at the White House's Office of Management and Budget candidly frets that "bad days" lie ahead : Emails released earlier this month show that at least one official of the Office of Management and Budget worried that Solyndra was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to ill-conceived government loans to green energy companies. “(W)hat’s terrifying is that...

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is demanding Energy Department documents relating to more than $4.7 billion in loan guarantees for solar projects approved Sept. 30, the deadline for financing under the stimulus law. Issa’s quest for documents — spelled out in an Oct. 7 letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu obtained by The Hill on Monday — signals a deepening of his loan guarantee probe, which joins a separate House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation of the failed solar panel manufacturing company Solyndra. Issa’s letter, noting “concerns” that the $535 million guarantee for Solyndra in...

A Daily Caller investigation has found that in addition to the failed company Solyndra, at least four other solar panel manufacturing companies receiving in excess of $500 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration employ executives or board members who have donated large sums of money to Democratic campaigns. And as questions swirl around possible connections between political donations and these preferential financing arrangements, the Obama White House suddenly began deflecting The Daily Caller’s questions on Wednesday to the Democratic National Committee. Asked Wednesday to comment on the connection between large Democratic donors and Obama administration loan guarantees to...

In a powerful signal that traditional energy companies are banking on solar power as part of their future, French oil giant Total plans to buy a controlling stake in San Jose-based SunPower (SPWRA), Silicon Valley's dominant solar panel manufacturer. Under the deal, jointly announced by the two companies Thursday as "a broad strategic relationship to shape the future of the solar industry," Total will buy a 60 percent stake in SunPower for $1.38 billion, paying a more than 40 percent premium over SunPower's stock price Wednesday. "This is old energy betting on new energy," SunPower CEO Tom Werner told this...

Aiming to make the solar industry self-supporting without subsidies in a decade and more globally competitive, Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Friday launched an initiative to try to cut photovoltaic solar energy costs 75% by 2020. And he brought out SunPower(SPWRA) co-founder Dick Swanson to talk about efficiency gains made to date. “In the 1960s President Kennedy launched the moonshot goal, to put a man on the moon within a decade. Today we’re launching what we call a SunShot race,” Chu said on a midday conference call with reporters.

San Jose-based SunPower, Silicon Valley's dominant solar panel manufacturer, on Monday announced three power purchase agreements with Southern California Edison to deliver 711 megawatts of solar power. The deal, one of the largest for photovoltaic solar power in the United States, would produce enough power for about 460,000 California homes. "This is an unprecedented time for solar photovoltaic," Marc Ulrich, the utility's vice president of renewable and alternative power, said in a statement. "We're seeing growth in technological advances and manufacturing efficiencies that result in competitive prices for green, emission-free energy for our customers." ... California's three largest utilities have...

Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store. Though the California installations will generate...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- SunPower Corp. shares rallied 18% Friday after the solar-panel maker announced its participation in a giant 800-megawatt, photovoltaic project from Pacific Gas & Electric Corp., hailed by industry insiders as the first major utility-scale endeavor of its kind in the United States. Analysts cheered the project's news as a positive move for the solar stocks, hit by concerns tied to a slowing economy and oversupply, as well as uncertainty over federal tax subsidies for alternative energy. A common sight on rooftops or emergency phones on the highway, photovoltaic panels are finally taking a stab at producing...