Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the Biden administration will be restarting the green energy loans that caused a huge scandal during the Obama/Biden administration. When this was pointed out to Granholm she brought up Solyndra and claimed that was an outlier. An outlier is often used to describe a poll that is much different from all other polling. But, Solyndra was hardly an outlier.
Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, @SecGranholm, in her first public address at #CERAWeek: "We have to add hundreds and hundreds of gigawatts of clean energy over the next 4 years. It is a huge amount and we have so little time."
— Joshua Siegel (@SiegelScribe) March 3, 2021
Granholm said:
“Our loan authority, $40 billion worth, has helped some of America’s bravest entrepreneurs get their best ideas off the ground and flourish into what they are today. Those kinds of projects have supported thousands and thousands of jobs, and taxpayers have made that money back and then some.”
The Energy Department’s loan program was created in 2009 was started under Obama/Biden and made about $35 billion in loans and loan guarantees. The bad loan made to Solyndra would probably not have happened if a member of the Obama/Biden administration had not written and asked that the loan be fast-tracked. Who would do such a thing? Joe Biden would and he did.
The fund went pretty much unused during the Trump administration with one noticeable exception, a $12 billion dollar loan guarantee for a nuclear power plant in Georgia.
Are all of these failed green energy companies outliers?:
- Evergreen Solar ($24 million)*
- SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
- Solyndra ($535 million)*
- Beacon Power ($69 million)*
- AES’s subsidiary Eastern Energy ($17.1 million)
- Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
- SunPower ($1.5 billion)
- First Solar ($1.46 billion)
- Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
- EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
- Amonix ($5.9 million)
- National Renewable Energy Lab ($200 million)
- Fisker Automotive ($528 million)
- Abound Solar ($374 million)*
- A123 Systems ($279 million)*
- Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($6 million)
- Johnson Controls ($299 million)
- Schneider Electric ($86 million)
- Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
- ECOtality ($126.2 million)
- Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
- Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
- Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
- Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
- Range Fuels ($80 million)*
- Thompson River Power ($6.4 million)*
- Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
- LSP Energy ($2.1 billion)*
- UniSolar ($100 million)*
- Azure Dynamics ($120 million)*
- GreenVolts ($500,000)
- Vestas ($50 million)
- LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($150 million)
- Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
- Navistar ($10 million)
- Satcon ($3 million)*
An Inspector General’s report released in 2015 concluded Solyndra officials used inaccurate information to mislead the Energy Department in its application for the $535 million loan guarantee. The report also found shortcomings in the Energy Department’s approval process for the loan guarantee to Solyndra.
Leaked internal emails also showed both the White House and then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office had pressured the Energy Department to speed up Solyndra’s loan approval despite outstanding concerns, according to the Washington Examiner.
