Facing a Friday deadline, the Energy Department has approved two loan guarantees worth more than $1billion for solar energy projects in Nevada and Arizona.They actually have $5 billion more ready to give away by Friday.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the department has completed a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110 megawatt solar tower in Nevada, and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150 megawatt solar plant in Arizona.
The loans were approved under the same program that paid for a $535 million loan to Solyndra Inc., a now-bankrupt solar panel maker that has become a rallying cry for Republican critics of the Obama administration's green energy program.
Great.
Update: More on those other loans forthcoming.
The Department of Energy is set this week to announce whether nine federal loan guarantees amounting to $6.5 billion for green energy projects will get final approval.
The number of full-time, permanent jobs they would create? According to the DOE's own figures, a grand total of 283. That is nearly $23 million per job.
It's also a drop in the bucket toward the five million green jobs President Obama promised as a candidate in 2008.
6 comments:
" ... that pesky Solyndra scandal won't be deterring the corrupt president from doling out more of your money. Why should Solyndra stop him?"
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Everything our Fraud-in-Chief has done so far has been calculated and deliberate. The economic results we're seeing constitute "feature" not "bug". (Think Cloward-Piven Strategy.)
Barky's been doing his darndest to destabilize the country and throw us into total chaos (class warfare, race warfare, economic meltdown, international crises). According to Alinsky-ite theory, when everything falls apart We-the-Proles will jump at the chance to elect a Progressive strong-man who declares he will reform all the evils of our rapacious capitalist system.
-- Good luck with that, Barky. You're toast. --
PS- By the way, Mr. Obama: you, yourself, personally --in just under 3 years!-- have utterly destroyed America's belief that Affirmative Action does any good for any individual person or for the country as a whole. Way to go, clown.
The problem with these solar loan guarantees (and most other loan guarantees) is that the government cannot know if the loans will pay off in the end. The sequence of games is: loan guarantee to a company, which uses the money to compete against other companies, which then tries to make a deal with consumers. If the company is successful, then the government can claim success in their larger game of "leadership" and "green job" creation. But the government isn't playing those middle two games against competitors and with consumers. And has no way of knowing if the company will be successful in either one.
The sequence of games (and analysis) for the Solyndra deal is at http://positivesumstrategist.com/?p=244, if you're interested.
The bottom line: these solar loan guarantees mean the government is putting taxpayer money in risky games they aren't even playing. And with only a guess at whether they will pay off.
Lessee... 5 million jobs times $23 million per... that's $115 trillion! Of course, one assumes that those first 283 jobs are the low-hanging fruit, and the next 4,999,717 jobs will cost a bit more. Let's say $200 trillion. Roughly speaking, that's the entire US GDP for the next decade. I can't wait! (And yes, I know, all of these calculations are fanciful.)
Jack Wiley Dithers has uncovered evidence that Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven F. Chu has the following 2011 performance goal from his boss "Launder a minimum of $10B through Green startup shells into the OFA account." Mr. Chu is expecting a big bonus this year.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Double down, triple down, quadruple down...
What comes after infinity?
Your last point is the best. The million$ per job created is the biggest problem with these two solar sites. At least reflective solar power generation has been in use for decades. Solar towers aren't new, and are reasonably efficient. Those places are great for handling the peak load from air conditioners in their area. The facilities will probably make money once constructed, and will be able to pay off their loans.
They would make money regardless of whether we the taxpayers guaranteed the loans. But for Obama's complete hash of spending and revenue priorities these projects could have obtained private financing without government involvement.
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