Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) wants answers from Energy Secretary Steven Chu about documents that appear to indicate that Mr. Chu personally intervened to help secure a $1.4 billion partial loan guarantee for a large-scale rooftop solar project known as Project Amp that was to be supplied equipment by the sinking ship that was Solyndra.

“It is astonishing that DOE actively negotiated a plan to risk even more taxpayer money to prop up Solyndra at all costs,” said Rep. Stearns.

In his role as Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Rep. Stearns sent Sec. Chu a letter inquiring why the Energy Secretary would have helped put even more taxpayer money at risk when it was clear Solyndra was yet another failed green energy scheme, particularly since the Department of Energy itself seemed squeamish about approving the loan:

Project Amp is a large-scale rooftop energy generation project using solar panels on commercial facility rooftops to generate electricity for sale to utilities and power purchasers.  The panels for first phase of Project Amp were to be sole sourced from the failing Solyndra, Inc.   Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that DOE had some hesitation in approving the loan guarantee and that Secretary Chu intervened on behalf of Project Amp.  This brings up many questions, including if this was an attempt to support the faltering Solyndra since it occurred during discussions over the second restructuring of the Solyndra loan guarantee.

According to Rep. Stearns letter, a Solyndra employee email suggests that, indeed, Mr. Chu was part of a Herculean effort to craft a deal that “went to higher levels in the Obama Administration”:

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Another day another taxpayer funded bailout to a politically connected energy company up to its eyeballs in debt. This time, it’s a California solar company called SunPower. And Judicial Watch is once again battling the Obama administration for details as to how the deal went down.

On February 1, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of the Treasury for records regarding the controversial $1.2 billion government loan guarantee from the Obama Department of Energy to SunPower, a California solar company reportedly $820 million in debt. (A similar lawsuit was filed on the same date by Judicial Watch against the U.S. Department of Navy for related documents.)

Here’s what Judicial Watch is after pursuant to its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed with the Departments of Interior and Treasury on October 21, 2011:

Any and all records regarding, concerning or related to the issuance of a Department of Energy loan guarantee to SunPower, Inc. and/or NRG Energy, Inc. on or about September 30, 2011.

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From CNN:

House Republicans investigating the loan controversy had requested all internal White House documents about the issue. House Energy and Commerce subcommittee chair Rep. Cliff Stearns said that includes emails on the President’s Blackberry.

On Friday the White House Counsel sent a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee explaining they won’t comply with the request because it “implicates longstanding and significant institutional Executive Branch confidentiality interests.”

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From The Hill:

House Republicans released an email Friday evening showing that a senior Treasury Department official in August expressed concern that the Energy Department’s early 2011 restructuring of the solar company Solyndra’s $535 million loan guarantee may have been illegal.

The restructuring put private investors, who were providing another $75 million to the struggling company, first in line for repayment if the company went under. In addition, House Republicans probing Solyndra – which collapsed several weeks ago – say DOE may have violated requirements to consult with Treasury on the revision of the loan agreement.

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s GOP leaders wrote to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Friday seeking documents about Treasury’s communication with the White House, DOE and other agencies on the financing.

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What could go wrong? From The Hill:

The Energy Department announced Wednesday that is has finalized more than $1 billion in loan guarantees for two separate solar energy projects.

The decision comes several weeks after Solyndra, a California-based solar manufacturer that received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Obama administration in 2009, filed for bankruptcy and laid off 1,100 workers, setting off a firestorm in Washington.

DOE announced a $737 million loan guarantee to help finance construction of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-megawatt solar-power-generating facility in Nye County, Nev. The project is sponsored by Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve.

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From the BBC:

A solar panel factory in eastern China has been shut down after protests by local residents over pollution fears.

Some 500 villagers staged a three-day protest following the death of large numbers of fish in a local river.

Some demonstrators broke into the plant in Zhejiang province, destroying offices and overturning company cars before being dispersed by riot police.

Tests on water samples showed high levels of fluoride, which can be toxic in high doses, officials said.

The BBC’s Juliana Liu in Shanghai says the Chinese villagers see the plant’s closure as a victory.

They accuse Jinko Solar, a Chinese company making solar panels for sale overseas, of dumping hazardous chemicals into the water supply, our correspondent says.

“We feel that it is socially responsible to close the factory first and to take corrective measures,” company spokesman Thomas Jing told the BBC.

Read the whole thing here. Remember, externalities are everywhere.

The White House’s Solyndra game plan and that of its talking head and media enablers is now apparent and requires correction.

First, the notion that Solyndra failed because China subsidized their own solar companies is absurd: these companies only exist where their host governments are propping them up. Period.

Next, it is clear from administration emails that the White House’s message was not, as Dem talking heads and other apologists are now offering, ’since you are approving this, we will schedule the visit’; it is instead, ’since we are scheduling the visit, this will be approved.’

Although this is apparent throughout, one message particularly captures it:

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week).  We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews and have the approval set the date for the announcement rather than the other way around.”  August 31, 2009, email between OMB and Terrell McSweeny of the Office of the Vice President, regarding “DOE Announcement.

This running governmental contracting scam makes the $600 toilet seat of the 1980s — which was bad, because, uh, it was the military — look pathetic. Obama’s green temporary jobs, by its own varying estimates, range in cost to the taxpayer from $355,555 (overall) to $479,000 (Solyndra) to $4.8 million if you remove the really temporary installation gigs. But that’s, um, ‘green’, so it’s not like the $600 toilet seat, at all.

Worse, after having shown the due diligence of the average Bernie Madoff investor desperate to leap on to a trendy ride their associates assured them was hot, the Obama administration is now rushing to emulate Madoff himself. The only twist on the analogy is that they are using you, the scheme’s old entrants — who in this version of Mr. Ponzi’s construct, never actually get paid off, but only his non-contributing buddies do — as its new, involuntary entrants .

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From BusinessInsider:

From its inception, Solyndra’s business model was flawed. It’s unique cylindrical, silicon solar cells were innovative, but only made sense when solar panel prices were high. By the time the Energy Department approved Solyndra’s loan — the first granted by the department’s loan guarantee program —Chinese and Canadian manufacturers with low-cost structures had priced Solyndra out of the market.

In March 2009, Solyndra’s loan application, to build an advanced manufacturing facility in California, was fast-tracked through the DOE, despite the fact that the department had not completed its review of the company’s financial viability.

Solyndra was not the only company that was fast-tracked. A 2010 government audit of the DOE program found that the department lacked the ability to adequately evaluate applications to the federal loan program, and often approved loans before completing a full review.

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From Bloomberg:

Solyndra LLC’s workers making solar-power panels in a California factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to the company in May 2010.

Two months before Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor’s warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors. That unwavering commitment has come under increasing scrutiny since the company’s travails culminated in its filing for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and a raid on its headquarters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation two days later.

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From NBC Bay Area News:

FBI agents armed with search warrants descended this morning on bankrupt solar company Solynrda this morning.

The investigation comes after a request by the Department of Energy’s inspector general, FBI spokesman Peter Lee told NBC Bay Area News.

Agents arrived at 7a.m. and are examining the factory. Solynrda has a skeleton crew of 100 workers on the scene, closing the factory down. A CNBC photographer on the scene says the FBI has promised a press conference. An agency spokesperson at its San Francisco headquarters says he’s unaware of any such plans.

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy last week, shocking both workers and the Obama administration, which had given the startup hundreds of millions of dollars in low interest loans.

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In this May 26, 2010 file photo, President Barack Obama, with Solyndra Chief Executive Officer Chris Gronet, looks at a solar panel, during a tour of Solyndra, Inc., a solar panel manufacturing facility, in Fremont, Calif. Solyndra received a $535 million loan from the U.S. government has announced layoffs of 1,100 workers and plans to file for bankruptcy. (WaPo)

Top Obama bundler George Kaiser made multiple visits to the White House in the months before the company was granted a $535 million loan from the government.
iWatch News reported, via Free Republic:

The i Watch News investigation confirmed that at least 18 other bundlers have ties to businesses poised to profit from the president’s political agenda, through stimulus money, government contracts, or other spending to promote clean energy technology or green development.

Oklahoma billionaire investor George Kaiser is one. A longtime Democratic donor, he is a big financial backer of a company that in March of 2009 won a $535 million loan guarantee [19] from DOE for a solar plant in Silicon Valley. He had multiple visits to the White House in the months before he was awarded the contract. Kaiser has not responded to interview requests from iWatch News.

This doesn’t look very good considering it was widely known that Solyndra was in deep economic trouble in 2010 and had negative cash flows since its inception.

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Chatter began to emerge on Thursday about the unique treatment received by the bankruptcy-declaring Solyndra, a government-dependent maker of solar panels whose scheme, shaped somewhere between a pyramid and a trapezoid, was described in the Washington Post no less the following way:

“You make something in a factory and it costs $6, you sell it for $3, but you really, really need to sell it for $1.50 to be competitive,” Lynch said of Solyndra. “It was an insane business model. The numbers just don’t work, and they never did.”

And yet, as the LA Times editorialized:

“Solyndra was the first company to be awarded a federal loan guarantee under the stimulus, worth $535 million. Taxpayers are likely to end up on the hook for much if not all of that amount, a highly embarrassing development for President Obama because he was among the company’s biggest cheerleaders. He visited its Fremont plant in May 2010 even though PricewaterhouseCoopers had weeks earlier raised doubts about its plans for an initial public offering by questioning whether it could continue as a going concern. …”

Also, “Other flags have been raised about how the Energy Department pushed the deal forward. The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and ABC disclosed that Energy Department officials announced the support for Solyndra even before final marketing and legal reviews were in. To government auditors, that move raised questions about just how fully the department vetted the deal — and assessed its risk to taxpayers — before signing off.”

Given the obvious rat-hole nature of the lost half-billion, LAT piquantly inquired, “is Obama using stimulus funds to reward his political contributors?” By all means, follow the odor of the ties between major Solyndra backer, key Obama fundraiser George Kaiser of Tulsa.

But there is another question about what political deal may have been involved in the Solyndra boondoggle.

Solyndra resides in Fremont, California, which in turn rests within the then-cozy confines of California’s 13th Congressional District, represented by Fortney “Pete” Stark. As chairman of the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee’s Health Subcommittee during Obama’s push for Obamacare, Stark was critical to Obama’s signature step in ‘fundamentally transforming America.’

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So President Obama decided to engage in some high-profile symbolism and re-install solar panels on the White House roof (what, no windmill?), a la Jimmy Carter, and in an embarrassing reversal. Although the clumsiness of an obvious political- and panic-driven pander has caused heartburn on the Left, in a related reversal, Obama also used his weekly address to revive the risible and previously ditched claim that Germany is proof of a state successfully centrally planning the ‘green economy’.

Not to leave their man in Washington hanging, if by sheer coincidence, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology bought a full page ad in the weekend Wall Street Journal to further promote Obama’s plan of the U.S. adopting economically painful, environmentally meaningless ‘green economy’ laws designed to increase your electricity (and other energy) costs.

It’s almost like they are telling us to watch out for the lame-duck session.

Clumsy and unseemly though it may be, there’s also the little problem with a lack of accuracy.

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So, China went big into windmill and solar panel production, causing the media and other liberals to breathlessly swoon over this further evidence of the wisdom of us mandating the things even though all it proves is that China is not dumb.

Rich countries say all weather is now their fault and vow to spend billions on uneconomic, inefficient and intermittent energy sources regardless of their merits or performance as penance and to show their seriousness of purpose in feeling really, really bad about the whole thing they alone talked themselves into. China volunteers to make the machines for us because, without absurd “green” policies of the sort causing energy prices to rise so high that seniors burn books to stay warm — in fact, China rejects the Kyoto agenda precisely because it has sworn off of that sort of poverty and knows what would keep them there — they can do it more cheaply.

And then they go to Copenhagen and hold us up for billions in new, “climate aid”, with more than a whiff of reparations about it because, after all, our government aided and abetted that line of argument.

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