October 12, 2011 - If you thought Solyndra was a bad deal for taxpayers, wait'll you hear about SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ). Solyndra is (was) a solar panel manufacturer that received a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government. Even with all of that money, however, Solyndra went bankrupt.But Solyndra may be just the tip of iceberg, so to speak, in the Obama Administration's misguided - and expensive - attempts to artificially nurture selected private "green" companies.
"How did a failing California solar company," asks Human Events this week, "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?"
Good question. Human Events goes on to note that SunPower "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."
What's truly incredible is that the White House seems oblivious to the mushrooming scandal that's come from their failed bankrolling of Solyndra. "With the FBI reportedly digging into the company for potential fraud," reported the San Jose Mercury News two weeks ago, "congressional Republicans had called on the Department of Energy not to rush loans through the approval pipeline just to beat the deadline."
"But as the clock ticked down," SJM's report continued, "the department approved four more solar energy loan guarantees worth nearly $5 billion. One of the biggest chunks -- $1.2 billion -- went to San Jose's SunPower (SPWRA), which is building a 250-megawatt solar plant in San Luis Obispo County." (Emphasis added)
Solyndra is, we now know, just one of a number of "green" boondoggles pushed by the Obama Administration. How many more will surface remains to be seen.
(Thanks to Chicago News Bench for the SunPower logo)
