Green Energy Triumph: $11,000,000.00 Spent Per Job Created

Yes the headline is correct. And contains a lesson in economics and imaginary markets, in it.

“Without much fanfare, the Department of Energy (DOE) recently updated the list of loan guarantee projects on its website,” the Institute for Energy Research noticed on Wednesday. ”Unlike in 2008, when Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million jobs over 10 years by directing taxpayer funds toward renewable energy projects, there were no press conferences or stump speeches.”

Uh-oh. Why weren’t there any celebrations? President Obama loves a good celebration. Why, we just found out about the super-secret star-studded bash he held after his inauguration.

Maybe it’s because the IER divided the $26 billion spent on “green jobs” by the Energy Department since 2009, divided it by the 2,298 permanent jobs created, and came up with a cost of $11.45 million per job.

Just imagine what the actual market – not the imaginary green one dreamed up by Obama and his billionaire cronies, who very much appreciate your support, even if they never seem to get around to thanking you for it – could have done with all those billions! Let’s see, $26 billion in loan guarantees, plus $13.5 billion in tax preferences, plus $5.8 billion in cash grants for “renewable energy”… that’s $45.3 billion that could have been returned to the people who earned it, through pro-growth tax cuts. Would anyone like to wager that the private sector couldn’t create more than 2,298 permanent jobs with that kind of dough?

Read more at humanevents.com …

Real markets do not behave this way.

Money well spent! I bet a large percentage of it ended up in Democrat coffers, it went to Democrat donors for the most part.

Another One Goes Plunk: Fisker Lays Off Majority Of Staff

Electric car buzz-kill …

Sorry, but still no battery, as Boeing found out. Cell phone batteries don’t play well with cars and airplanes.

We need more cars which run on ground up Unicorns and Pixie Dust. Beats the heck out of drilling for real energy. Do you think the Islamist’s think we are stupid?

But now the shining star of the Obama waste of taxpayers money, goes plunk …. Sell it all to the Chinese, why not they own most of Obama’s failures anyway.

Fisker Automotive, the plug-in hybrid sports-car maker that has been grappling with financial troubles, laid off about 160 of its more than 200 employees Friday morning.

A Fisker source who was among the employees affected said the layoff took place at about 8 a.m. Pacific.

At about 8:30 a.m., employees were seen leaving Fisker headquarters in Anaheim, Calif., some carrying boxes and many with large white envelopes. Two people who identified themselves as Fisker employees but declined to give their names verified the layoffs took place.

The former Fisker employees said they were given no severance pay, other than compensation for untaken vacation days.

Fisker will retain about 53 senior managers and executives, a source told Reuters today, primarily to pursue buyers for the company’s assets. Another unnamed employee verified that figure to Automotive News.

Calls to Fisker spokesmen and to Fisker’s main phone number were not answered.

The cuts came less than a week after Fisker employees returned to work on April 1 after being furloughed on March 22. Fisker also is nearing a late-April deadline to repay some of the $193 million loaned to it by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The embattled automaker has retained crisis communications firm Sitrick and Co., based in Los Angeles.

Reuters reported last week that Fisker also had retained the law firm Kirkland and Ellis to prepare for a possible bankruptcy filing. Earlier in March, company founder Henrik Fisker resigned citing “several major disagreements with management” over the company’s business strategy.

Fisker has built about 1,800 units of its $100,000 Karma plug-in hybrid, but none since battery maker A123 Systems declared bankruptcy last summer, leaving Fisker without a battery supplier.

Meanwhile, Fisker has been racing to find a partner or buyer to shore up its shaky finances. According to press reports, Zhejiang Geely, which owns Volvo, led the bidding to take over Fisker around the time of Fisker’s resignation but later lost interest in a deal.

Dongfeng Motor Co. of China, which has collaborated on some projects with Nissan Motor Co., also had expressed interest in Fisker, but those talks appear stalled.

On April 1, Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher told Automotive News that the company was still in talks with more than one potential partner.

Read more:

Golf Carts, We Need Inovation, We Need a Leader

How long can it go on …. Why do you need to fly to Chicago to give a radio address. Odd. Doesn’t he know we have this new fangled electricity thing?

Barack Obama went to Chicago this week in his taxpayer paid for private 747 to tout his fuel-saving plan in his weekly radio address.

Obama delivered his speech from Argonne National Laboratory which won $120 million Department of Energy project last year.

Then there’s this…

The taxpayer-subsidized lab Obama used to plug green energy in his Weekly Address hasn’t produced any batteries.

Electric cars make good golf carts, so maybe that’s what is going on, we want to be the world’s foremost golf cart manufacturer, if we can ever find a battery. Else we will have to just settle for windmills.

Does anyone think how we are supposed to charge all these new pixie dust batteries??

Clean Coal Process Developed to Extract Energy Without Burning or CO2

Technology …. Remember Bush’s clean coal? Yes it’s still moving forward. shhh don’t say Bush or “clean coal”, around Obummer.

Unlike electric cars which seems to need a battery.

When a team of Ohio State students worked around the clock for nine days straight recently, they weren’t pulling the typical college “all-nighters.”

Instead, they were reaching a milestone in clean coal technology.

For 203 continuous hours, they operated a scaled-down version of a power plant combustion system with a unique experimental design–one that chemically converts coal to heat while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction.

This new technology, called coal-direct chemical looping, was pioneered by Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of Ohio State’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory. (Fan is a Distinguished University Professor and a 2012 Innovator of the Year.)

Getting out of the Kitchen: Energy Secretary Chu Steps Down, Blasts Climate-Change Skeptics

Hey choo Chu man caused climate change, it’s a big fat government lie. Those of us that actually know something about science can prove it is.

And the emails from East Anglia climate unit, show it is … they know it too.

The Ticket – Yahoo! News

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist frequently the target of Republican criticism, announced Friday that he was stepping down in the latest shake-up of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. Chu, who disclosed his decision in a letter to Energy Department staff, frequently clashed with GOP lawmakers over gas prices as well as government backing for green-energy companies like the failed firm Solyndra.

In his letter, Chu took aim directly at his critics, saying the clean-energy efforts were a success—and blasted climate-change skeptics as trapped in “the Stone Age.”
…
He also scolded climate-change skeptics and urged a shift from fossil-fuels to other sources of energy.

“The overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity has had a significant and likely dominant role in climate change,” Chu warned in his letter. “There is also increasingly compelling evidence that the weather changes we have witnessed during this thirty year time period are due to climate change.”

And who gives a tinkers damn what a consensus of fools has to say?

Baseload is Just A “Coal” Industry Idea (Yes And Darkness Is A “Renewable” Energy Idea, Right?)

Ever look at those satellite maps of the world at night?Notice anything? Like the number of countries that don’t have country wide power?

We have become so accustom to full time, just flip the switch, power and instant light we forget that we are not the norm in the world, who does with electricity. Ever think what it would be like to live in one of those dark countries? Have you ever wondered why Africa is mostly dark at night? Gives meaning to Dark Continent … You want to know how a continent rich in coal is still dark at night. For the answer to that perplexing question ask the dictators in Africa, and the IMF who pays them to keep it that way.

Modern society runs on electricity. Is that why our breezy turd world President is so hell bent on shutting the power off? Ask the New York City residents how that is working out for them?

Stuffing Our Money Down The Green Hole

Complete Colorado reported:

Recent remarks by President Obama to a Denver-based TV anchor stand in stark contrast to new emails obtained by CompleteColorado.com. This past Friday, President Obama told KUSA’s Kyle Clark, in response to a question on the federally-backed but failed Colorado company Abound Solar, “And these are decisions, by the way, that are made by the Department of Energy (DOE), they have nothing to do with politics.” And just one year ago, White House advisor David Plouffe had this exchangewith NBC’s David Gregory regarding the politcal questions surrounding many of the DOE-backed projects:

DAVID GREGORY: Were campaign contributors involved here in terms of their projects that ultimately forced the government’s hand?

DAVID PLOUFFE: Absolutely not. These decisions about the loan program were made by career officials in the Department of Energy on the merits. 

Apparently another lie

CompleteColorado.com has obtained emails that seem to directly contradict Plouffe’s answer, and also challenge the President’s notion that the DOE’s loan decisions were universally autonomous within the agency. The emails also lend even more credence to the theory that the loan to Abound Solar was political payback to Colorado’s wealthy Democratic benefactor and Gang-of-Four member, Pat Stryker.

Another DOE-Backed Solar Company Goes Bankrupt

Maybe a calculator could have prevented 10s of Billions of wasted tax money Mr Obama. you do know how to use a calculator don’t you? Sounds like something a good EE grad would know how to do…

A solar company that got a multi-million-dollar grant from the Department of Energy earlier this year announced Wednesday that it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, making it the second taxpayer-backed green energy company to file for bankruptcy this week.

Satcon Technology Corp. announced the decision in a Wednesday news release. “This has been a difficult time for Satcon,” president and CEO Steve Rhoades said. “After careful consideration of available alternatives, the Company’s Board of Directors determined that the Chapter 11 filings were a necessary and prudent step, allowing the Company to continue to operate while giving us the opportunity to reorganize with a stronger balance sheet and capital structure.”

Satcon received a $3 million DOE grant in January to develop “a compact, lightweight power conversion device that is capable of taking utility-scale solar power and outputting it directly into the electric utility grid at distribution voltage levels—eliminating the need for large transformers.”

“If successful,” noted DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) at the time, “Satcon would simplify the solar power conversion process and significantly reduce the cost of operating, installing, and siting a PV power system—helping to facilitate their widespread use.”

ARPA-E also stated that the grant “could create jobs for system installers, technicians, and salespeople.”

Abound To Fail

Seven months after calling themselves the “anti-Solyndra,” the Colorado-based solar panel manufacturer Abound Solar announced it was filing for chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation, arguing that cheap Chinese solar panels flooding the market caused their demise.

“With over $30 billion in reported government subsidies, Chinese panel makers were able to sell below cost and put Abound out of business before we were big enough to pose a real competitive threat to China’s rapidly growing market share,” according to the prepared congressional testimony by Craig Witsoe, former CEO of Abound.

Abound Solar was given a $400 million loan guarantee by the Energy Department, and drew on about $70 million dollars of the guarantee before DOE cut them off in September 2011 — the same month the Solyndra scandal began.

After the massive failure of the solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, Energy Department loan guarantees came under increased media and congressional scrutiny. Other loan recipients felt the public pressure as well.

Internal documentation and testimony from sources within Abound show that the company was selling a faulty, underperforming product, and may have mislead lenders at one point in order to keep itself afloat.

“Our solar modules worked as long as you didn’t put them in the sun,” an internal source told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The company knew its panels were faulty prior to obtaining taxpayer dollars, according to sources, but kept pushing product out the door in order to meet Department of Energy goals required for their $400 million loan guarantee.

“The DOE hurt us more than anything,” another source told The DC News Foundation, speaking of DOE production and revenue metrics.

The faulty solar panels would routinely burn up and virtually all of the panels Abound manufactured underperformed, meaning they did not put out the promised amount of power. Sources say that Abound panels would only put out between 80 and 85 percent of the promised wattage.

These problems led to tens of thousands of panels having to be replaced, especially towards the end of the company’s life.

Burning up and underperforming

In October of 2010, the company discovered that their panels were catching fire. One source said that this problem was brought to the company’s attention during a meeting in October 2010 with some company executives present and the suggestion was made to shut down the factory in order to address the problem.

“Our lead quality engineer… blew the whistle in a manager’s monthly review meeting, and he was basically told to shut up and sit down,” said another source.

Read more:

‘No More Solyndras’ Act

At least the Republicans are trying to stop the treasury raids by Obama and his looney energy policies. The stupidity of it all, kickbacks to donors, just throwing taxpayer money at problems does not work. It has to stop. Obama is turning America into a third world country, with loans like these …

The crony capitalism involved in the Obama administration’s Solyndra scandal that left taxpayers on the hook for a half billion dollars in government-backed loans must not be allowed to be repeated, Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., tells Newsmax.TV.

“The title of the bill is ‘No More Solyndras’ and it has three major components,”

Stearns said.

“The first is, we do away with the program so no more loan guarantees like this can occur. The second thing is we make sure there are no more subordinations so that the Department of Energy can’t bring in, for example, hedge funds and permit them to get access to taxpayers’ funds and taxpayers are no longer part of the process.”

With the increasing federal deficit, it’s time to start examining where taxpayer money is going and how it is being spent. Republicans have targeted the Department of Energy’s questionable loan programs for renewable energy companies with the ‘No More Solyndras’ Act. The DOE program began at the end of the Bush administration, but under the Obama stimulus it exploded, with $47 billion more in loan granting authority.  The DOE loan guarantee problem lies in the fact that there has been little to no oversight and monitoring of the loans and how the money was being spent. Even worse, there is no definitive reason as to why certain companies were chosen for the loans in the first place.

The ‘No More Solyndra Act’, introduced in the U.S House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee by committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) would disband the loan program, stop the Energy Department from issuing any loan guarantees for applications received after 2011, and set new guidelines and standards for applications and loans already awarded. Under the ‘No More Solyndras Act’, all loan guarantees under DOE consideration must be reviewed by the Treasury Department before awarded. This draft bill also states that if the Department of Energy chooses to make a guarantee against the Treasury’s decision, they must submit a report to Congress detailing their decision. ‘No More Solyndras’ also mandates that the DOE consult with the Treasury Department if any loan guarantees require restructuring. The draft bill also calls for the prevention of “subordination” of the taxpayers to private investors. This last point is in reference to the fact that in past cases the Department of Energy put private investors ahead of taxpayers in terms of being repaid in the case of a bankruptcy. This Act also calls for an economic analysis to be run on each individual company to ensure their project is viable. Investigations by various organizations and agencies have found that many loan guarantees were pushed through even after the DOE suggested pulling the companies funding.

It is not that renewable energy doesn’t deserve a chance to compete with natural gas and other forms of energy, but it does need to compete fairly. Right now we are throwing billions of dollars in loans, grants, and subsidies at an industry that cannot effectively compete on its won’t. Even with DOE throwing billions of taxpayer funds into alternative energy companies their profitability and competitiveness is falling. Until the technology is there to effectively, efficiently, and affordably produce renewable energy, we need to stop wasting the taxes paid by hard working Americans that result in jobless, bankrupt companies.

A draft of the ‘No More Solyndras’ Act passed the Energy and Power House subcommittee yesterday and is expected to come to a full committee hearing and vote soon.  If passed it will receive a bill number and be introduced to the House of Representatives, where Stearns (R-Fla.) hopes a vote will occur before the August recess.

Freedom works report.