Today, A123 Systems filed for bankruptcy, taking with it some $250 million of your money. Actually, now that I think of it, it was probably $250 million we borrowed from China, but you will have to pay it back. This company, just like Solyndra, was one of President Obama’s green energy pet projects. Read more
The “clean energy” company Solyndra has a dirty new problem — hazardous waste abandoned at its manufacturing sites.
The Fremont Fire Department’s Jay Swardenski oversees the cleanup. He said some materials, such as cadmium, are toxic, and hard to dispose of.
“They don’t degrade at all, so we want to make sure we don’t allow these materials to get into the environment,” he said.
It’s not just the leftover hazardous materials, but also the machinery used to apply them to the glass tubes. “Certainly those tools will need to be decontaminated, cleaned up, handled correctly as they are taken apart,” he said.
Swardenski told CBS 5 the disposal process is going smoothly in Fremont, but what about nearby Milpitas? Solyndra leased a building on California Circle for the final assembly of its solar panels. But the cleanup at the leased building in Milpitas is in limbo, because Solyndra doesn’t want to pay.
CBS 5 found the building locked up, with no one around. At the back, a hazardous storage area was found. There were discarded buckets half filled with liquids and barrels labeled “hazardous waste.”
It would seem that “clean energy” isn’t clean, would it?
Within a Treasury Department audit report released on April 3, we learn – not surprisingly – the review process for government-backed Solyndra loan was rushed thanks to Department of Energy pressure, and the fact the review process itself was undefined.
I’m sitting here laughing. I was just wondering if there were any Obama administration Friday night document drops last week … and sure enough, we’ve got more Solyndra-themed emails from inside the White House.
Last week, Abound Solar announced that it had fired 180 employees, and would shut down production of its solar panels at least until the end of the year. Advanced Solar was the recipient of a $400 million loan guarantee from you, the taxpayers, to build two factories. Read more
You are already on the hook for $528 million as a result of the Solyndra bankruptcy. But, to add insult to injury, you will now have to dig deeper into your pocket to cover an additional $14.3 million. The original $528 million was courtesy of the Department of Energy. Last week, the Department of Labor decided to spend an additional $14.3 “fixing” the problem created by the DOE. Here is how this works. Read more
Remember Solyndra? This weekend, Beacon Power Corporation of Tyngsboro, Massachusetts filed for bankruptcy protection. In August, 2010, the Obama administration, through the Department of Energy, gave it a $43 million loan guarantee to build a plant in Stephentown, New York that opened in January, 2011.
Here is what Beacon Power does. It makes,
[f]ast-spinning flywheels [that] can absorb and dispatch quick bursts of power onto the [electric power] grid to maintain a balance between supply and demand.
The Department of Energy doesn’t seem worried though.
Beacon’s U.S. loan agreement includes’“many protections for the taxpayer,’ said Damien LaVera, an Energy Department spokesman.
‘This [Stephentown, N.Y.] plant itself, which is operational and generating revenue, is a valuable collateral asset,’ LaVera said in an e-mail yesterday. The Beacon Power subsidiary that received the loan guarantee ‘has cash reserves and proceeds from the plant that it was required to hold as collateral on the loan.’
Super. Let’s let the government run the Stephentown plant. If my memory serves me correctly, the government couldn’t even run a brothel in Nevada. Good luck with this project.
But, this is somewhat interesting. The bankruptcy petition lists $72 million in assets and $47 million in liabilities. Asset valuation, much like beauty, can tend to be in the eyes of the beholder, but liabilities are cast in concrete. Of the $47 million in liabilities, $39.1 million (some 83%) is currently owed to you, the taxpayer.
Personally, I believe the government shouldn’t be “investing” in private companies. So far their track record doesn’t seem to be stellar. Thankfully, the federal government doesn’t make my IRA investment decisions…yet.
We’ll keep you posted.
Update:
In 2009 Beacon Power was also given a $24 million “Smart Grid stimulus grant” to build a plant outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I do not know whether it ever received this money, but, I do know that the plant was never built.
Jonathan Silver, the Department of Energy official who supervised the $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, announced he will be leaving the Department of Energy. According to the DOE, Mr. Silver decided in July, (before the public knew the Solyndra deal “blew up”, but after the DOE knew that it would) that he would be leaving at the end of the fiscal year. Read more
When – over a period of decades – we allow the federal government to get intimately involved with contracts and government-backed loans for companies like Solyndra in an effort to push worn political and environmental agendas, we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves.