Biden’s Latest Green Energy Scheme
‘His administration has reenergized the same loan program that caused the Obama administration debacle.’
In a move eerily reminiscent of the failed Solyndra, President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy has doled out massive loans in green energy initiatives to corporations.
Remember Solyndra? Way back in 2009, the administration of Barack Obama, newly inaugurated and stoked with the ideological fire of environmental zeal, greenlit a $535 million loan guarantee to a company by that name to mass produce easy-to-install cylindrical solar units.
It was the poster child of Obama’s initiative to grow clean-tech jobs, the model for his administration’s effort to pump $80 billion into the green energy sector. To plump the program, the president made a flashy appearance at Solyndra’s factory in Fremont, California, just months prior to the 2010 midterms, saying that investing in clean energy is “the right thing to do for our environment, it’s the right thing to do for our national security, but it’s also the right thing to do for our economy.”
For American taxpayers, though, investing in Solyndra was the wrong thing to do. A little over a year after Obama’s visit, the firm shut down its hi-tech cylindrical photovoltaic fabrication plant and laid off most of its 1,100 workforce. Then it filed for bankruptcy and was raided by the FBI. Left holding a bag with $535 million in it were those same American taxpayers.
An investigation completed years later found that Solyndra had provided the government with “false and misleading information during the application process” and “that the actions of certain Solyndra officials were, at best, reckless and irresponsible or, at worst, an orchestrated effort to knowingly and intentionally deceive and mislead the Department.” It also discovered that the Energy Department’s “due diligence efforts were less than fully effective…. the Department missed opportunities to detect and resolve indicators that portions of the data provided by Solyndra were unreliable.” According to another report, one of the private investors backing the project was a big Obama fund-raising bundler.
