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Our national conversation has become so politicized that it's hard to talk about anything without setting off an argument.
Not the weather. And certainly not the failure of Solyndra, the solar company that went bankrupt after getting a $535 million loan from the Obama administration.
Yesterday's hearing of the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, focusing in part on Solyndra, was more like an inquisition than a fact-finding exercise.
It was titled "How Obama's Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs." That was before the testimony began.
No matter that chief inquisitor Darrell Issa, who now denounces clean energy subsidies, once sought a loan guarantee for Aptera, an electric car maker that wanted to set up shop in his district. Dan Burton, the No. 2 Republican on the panel, supported a federal guarantee for Abound Solar, a company in his district.
What hypocrisy.
Democrats are little better, particularly as they blather on about green jobs. Sure, when Washington subsidizes clean energy, jobs may be created. The thing is, when the government subsidizes anything (oil exploration, ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, home ownership), you get more of it, and more jobs. Does this mean that market-distorting subsidies are an efficient way to create jobs? The question answers itself.
[By the way, there was some amusing back-and-forth at the hearing about what constitutes a green job. It turns out that bus drivers, whether driving they are driving hybrid buses or not, are doing "green jobs" because mass transport is greener than driving, my friend Matthew Wald reports in The Times.]
So what, if anything, can we learn from Solyndra's failure? Should the government stop financing clean energy, as some Republicans say? Or preserve today's subsidies, as the industry would like?
To put the Solyndra story in context, I listened to a call yesterday with two solar industry veterans, Dan Shugar, the CEO of Solaria and Arno Harris, the CEO of Recurrent Energy. Neither company, for the record, has received direct loan guarantees from the energy department (and I know from my past dealings with him that Shugar's a straight shooter).
First, Solyndra's failure does not mean there's anything wrong with the solar business. Just the opposite.
"Contrary to all the chatter out there, solar's here, solar's ready, solar's booming," said Harris. The Solar Energy Industries Association reported this week that the solar PV market grew by 69 percent during the second quarter of 2011, compared to Q2 of 2010. The group said:
The U.S. remains poised to install 1,750 megawatts of PV in 2011, double last year's total and enough to power 350,000 homes.
The industry employs about 100,000 people. "Solar employs more Americans than coal mining or iron and steel manufacturing," Harris noted. Then again, Walmart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S.
Great Conclusion
Great Conclusion
"there's no compelling reason for the government to provide loans, grants, tax breaks or favors to individual companies, no matter how worthy they may appear to be.
"For a lot of reasons -- the temptation to play political favorites, the risk of outright corruption, the fact that worthy companies can raise money in private markets -- it's not a job best done by experts at the U.S. Department of Energy.
Particularly because they're betting with other people's money."
Congratulations, Mark! That's the most lucid thing I have read from you.
Welcome to the Tea Party!
What we learned from Solyndra
What we learned from Solyndra is that govt should not try to pick individual winners and losers because that will corrupt the process and invite in influences beyond market influences. (And it happens in our home state of MD too Mark). Instead government should set policies for the entire market and let the market decide winners and losers.
Elon Musk's Solar City just
Elon Musk's Solar City just blew out of the DOE Loan program because they cooked the books and bought influence just like Tesla. Steve Spinner, Matt Rogers and Lachlan Seward at DOE manipulated the process to ignore Tesla's fake financials because Tesla bought their loan from the White House, the investigations will prove this and Tesla will be history.
good grief. what, pray tell,
good grief. what, pray tell, is a "free economy" in the US, oil is subsidized, nukes are subsidized, coal is subsidized,natural gas is subsidized. tax expenditures, by definition, are all subsidies. are we not going to require the same criteria for these technologies? otherwise, the spector of a free economy, is academic pablum. raising that strawman of RE subsdies without openly and immediately admitting that dinosaur fuels have been propped up much longer and to a much bigger dollar value is sophistry.
and China is not subsidizing its solar industry? really? China frequently provides both zero-cost financing, occasionally free land and other kinds of incentives and subsidies (some estimates of $30B) to its wind and solar companies