Solyndra, Obama, and Loans

What people may or may not know is that Obama wants to reshape the American economy into something more eco-friendly.

His preferred way of doing this, shockingly, is spending lots of money. Specifically giving out loan guarantees to companies that have absolutely no right to the quantity of government money being thrown at them.

I have railed on before about Fisker Automotive and Tesla - two electric car start-ups which were both given over $500 million loans which we will likely never see back.

But this might be worse.

In the growing area of thin-film solar (basically next generation photovoltaics) there are a number of companies, First Solar being the biggest. However, the Obama administration (and it really is directly the administration - one of Obama's friends is the Czar in charge of assigning these loans) decided that Solyndra needed $535 million.


On Wednesday morning Obama took a tour around the factory, and all the TV outlets talked about how the factory was a model for the future of American industry and what a modern environmental facility could look like. But, and interestingly enough it was a green tech blog that wrote about this first, the whole thing is probably going to fail. Solyndra has probably the highest manufacturing costs of any thin film solar company, about $4/watt, as opposed to under $1/watt for the industry leaders. It also already has $500 million in debt. It needs the DOE money just to stay solvent, let alone grow in the big healthy new American economy Obama wants it to. According to Morgan Stanley, the most likely outcome is complete collapse of the company.

It just goes to show the special breed of idiot that is running this country right now. They are throwing around taxpayer dollars like Monopoly money and they have no goddamn idea what they are doing.

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