How to talk about Solyndra (and Evergreen)

The Chinese are massively subsidizing the solar market and the Republicans in Congress would rather obstruct and condemn than recognize that the U.S. has a major problem competing.

Dirty Energy receives massive tax breaks, incentives and subsidies Republicans refuse to address or discuss.

How to Talk About Solyndra
—By Kevin Drum



You've probably heard of Solyndra by now, right? It's the solar power company that got $500 million in Recovery Act loans from the Department of Energy and then went belly up a couple of weeks ago.

Conservatives have been trying to paint this as a big scandal of some kind, despite the fact that: the company had plenty of private investors too; it's the only DOE loan that has failed so far; and there's no real evidence that anyone in the White House did anything worse than push OMB to speed up their decision-making process a bit in 2009. Stephen Lacey has the full timeline here.

But I think Dave Roberts probably has the bigger picture right:

Watching this unfold over the last week, I keep thinking back to "Climategate." When it first broke back in late 2009, lefties and bloggers and Dem lawmakers just ignored it, because it was obviously dumb. This left the field entirely open to a massive attack from the right, coordinated among ideological media, staffers, lobbyists, and pols. When the left finally stirred itself to action, all that emerged were a bunch of long, boring investigations into the details and good-faith efforts to be fair about how both sides a point. By the time five separate investigations had cleared the scientists of all wrongdoing, the damage was done. Now we're seeing the same script play out again.

…The right is going after this whole hog, trying to make the name synonymous with clean energy boondoggle. And the left is flailing around, throwing out this fact and that fact with no coherent message. Lord am I tired of watching this script play out.

Unfortunately, I think that a bit of flailing was inevitable. Conservatives had a clear attack line: anything and everything that makes Solyndra look bad. They didn't care what. Liberals didn't have the same luxury. At the time this story broke, none of us knew enough about Solyndra to really have any idea if the company itself was defensible, so a bit of hesitancy was inevitable. But Dave is right: At this point we do know enough, and there's really no reason to hesitate any longer. Basically, Solyndra was working on a solar technology that promised to be cheaper than silicon, and at the time of the loan it looked really promising both to DOE and to private investors. But then the market turned: Silicon prices dropped, and China started producing super low-cost silicon PV. That spelled doom for Solyndra. They had a good idea, but it didn't work out.

In any case, Solyndra is a tiny fraction of DOE's green-energy loan program, and Solyndra's loan guarantees are dwarfed by those of both fossil fuel and nuclear companies, which range into the multiple billions. There was no scandal in the loan process, and there's nothing unusual about having a certain fraction of speculative programs like this fail. It's all part of the way the free market works.

Want to learn more? Read the timeline here, and then listen to Rep. Ed Markey at Wednesday's hearing. You'll learn the facts from one, and how to talk about Solyndra from the other. No more flailing, okay?


From: Nuclear After Japan
Since 2005, new U.S. reactors (if any) have been 100+% subsidized--yet they couldn't raise a cent of private capital, because they have no business case. They cost 2-3 times as much as new windpower, and by the time you could build a reactor, it couldn't even beat solar power. Competitive renewables, cogeneration, and efficient use can displace all U.S. coal power more than 23 times over--leaving ample room to replace nuclear power's half-as-big-as-coal contribution too--but we need to do it just once. Yet the nuclear industry demands ever more lavish subsidies, and its lobbyists hold all other energy efforts hostage for tens of billions in added ransom, with no limit.

From: U.S. Nuclear Industry Goes Nuclear

Consider this -- Nuclear Energy costs

$7,500 per kilowatt to build


That’s more than double the capital costs for solar power and three and a half times the cost for wind.

the most heavily subsidized industry in the energy sector.

In 2005, Congress handed the nuclear power industry $13 billion in federal aid, and two years later went on to approve an additional $20.5 billion in loan guarantees, making U.S. taxpayers the cosigners on loans for new nuclear projects -- half of which are expected to end in defaults.

Wind is already more competitive than electricity generated from new nuclear and coal-fired power plants.

Recently, this article was quite interesting:

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

As well as this:
$22 trillion Social Security surplus revealed on C-SPAN

The time has come for candor.