(Reuters) – Solyndra LLC failed to attract any bids on Tuesday from buyers who could have restarted production, brought back some laid off staff and kept the bankrupt solar panel maker operating, according to a company adviser.

Solyndra, which owes more than $500 million to the U.S. government, has said a turnkey buyer is the best hope for getting the most money for the government and other creditors. However, no turnkey bids were submitted by a Tuesday deadline, said company adviser Eric Carlson of Imperial Capital LLC.

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As a repository of reader insight adding context to or exposing flaw or omissions of a paper’s news and editorial pages, the letters section of the Wall Street Journal is typically unmatched among other outlets.

I have spent some time on the phone and in correspondence with the Letters editor to conclude he is thoughtful and on the ball, though exceptions to the page’s excellence occur. While we do not expect perfection here on earth, sometimes these exceptions are so ridiculous as to demand ridicule. Saturday’s Letters page is a case in point.

Wind’s taxpayer lifeline is expiring, and you can feel it in the air. Responding to a piece touting shale gas, a windmill enthusiast wrote to defend the honor of his beloved pinwheels against gas, a proxy for abundant, reliable (they always work, so you can actually run an economy on them…wind, well, not so much) fossil fuels:

The energy to service a wind farm is free. For gas generation you need water, steel, energy, labor, chemicals and food stocks…

If there is a point here it must be to imply that wind energy is cheaper. It is a twist on the old line spouted by “renewables” pushers, “the wind and the sun are free!”, ignoring that wind and solar power are bloody expensive.

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From Reuters:

Chu, a bookish physicist and Nobel laureate, took full responsibility for decisions on the loan, but did not apologize. He said his department did its due diligence on the risks, and was not influenced by Solyndra investor George Kaiser, an Obama donor.

He tried to give long and detailed answers, irking Republicans running the hearing.

“I don’t want you to take all of my time – can you just give a really short answer?” said Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican who has led the committee’s probe.

Republicans argue the government could have pulled the plug earlier, but instead restructured the deal.

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From The Hill:

House Republicans released emails Wednesday that show a major fundraiser for President Obama discussed the $535 million loan guarantee for the solar company Solyndra during a meeting with White House officials.

George Kaiser, a “bundler” for Obama’s campaign whose foundation invested in Solyndra, said the issue “came up” during a spring 2010 meeting with White House officials. Ken Levit, executive director of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, also attended the meeting.

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The Department of Energy bragged about giving a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to SunPower, a politically connected solar energy company, to create “10-15 permanent jobs,” raising critical questions as to if California SunPower is the next Solyndra in the ongoing Crony-Gate scandal.

Unlike Solyndra, which went bankrupt after receiving the loan from the government leaving taxpayer on the hook, SunPower’s deal is more complicated.  Many questions are being raised about how the company was able to obtain the loan and what they did after they got the money.  Questions include:

• How could the Department of Energy give a loan to a company that was under a shareholder suit alleging securities fraud and misrepresentations?
• The son of Rep. George Miller (D-CA) who was paid $178,000 to lobby on behalf of the company represented SunPower as a lobbyist.  Why did Rep. George Miller tour the SunPower facility – which is outside his congressional district – and what other official action did Rep. Miller take on behalf of the company that is represented by his lobbyist son?
• Did the company’s hefty political contributions to the Obama campaign and the DCCC play a role in the deal?
• Did U.S. taxpayers help pay for the company to open a facility in Mexico after the announcement of the loan?
• Was the U.S. government aware that company executives were in the process of selling a portion of the company to a French company – an action that was undertaken two weeks after the loan was awarded?  Did the loan allow insider’s to cash out leaving other investors holding on to the stock that has dropped by more than 60% since the loan was awarded?

Questionable Finances

In 2009, a year before the DOE awarded the loan, investors in SunPower filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging SunPower and certain of the Company`s executive officers were in violation of federal securities laws.

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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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From the Associated Press:

The deals announced Friday include a $1.5 billion loan guarantee to Florida-based NextEra Energy and other investors that bought a planned 550-megawatt solar farm on federal land in Southern California from First Solar, as well as $646 million to Illinois-based Exelon Corp. for a 230-megawatt solar plant near Los Angeles. Next Era Energy Resources and GE Energy Financial Services bought the Desert Sunlight project from First Solar, while Exelon bought the Antelope Valley project. First Solar will continue to build and operate both projects.

A third project, worth $1.2 billion, will help San Jose-based SunPower Corp. build a 250-megawatt solar plant in California, while $1.4 billion will go San Francisco-based Prologis Inc. to support installation of about 750 solar rooftop panels in 28 states.

The loan program expires on Friday.

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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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The Solyndra scandal involving the squandering a half a billion taxpayer dollars down a campaign supporter’s rathole, and then subordinating the taxpayer to another of said supporter’s interests in apparent violation of the Energy Policy Act, marches on. And as it does, so do the ramblings of Obama administration apologists sensing the danger posed, and their talking points are becoming increasingly confused.

But one distraction has proved persistent within the repertoire even as others get tried out. It is a new utilitarian “green” talking point, applied so far to the entire suite of folly, from electric cars to windmills, and thus deserves response. That is, we had to make bold moves on this front or face the prospect of falling behind China in the great [insert green boondoggle here] race.

Given that this does not seem to be going away any time soon, please consider the following about the alleged Yellow Peril.

Americans should be far more concerned about Belgium producing better beer, chocolate and Brussels sprouts than us than over the prospect of China developing a superior solar panel. It’s a solar panel. Not Flubber.

I understand that this can be difficult to keep in mind with all of the mysticism attached to anything labeled “green”. But the romantic folly is getting really expensive.

Solar electricity generation was first patented in 1888 and Music Men have sauntered into town ever since vowing revolutionary this and that and cost competitiveness juuust around the corner — it’s always been just around the corner, and always will be — and that they’ve finally fixed the bugs in the system such that it’s now viable…some of which bugs upon scrutiny are actually features (the sun, like the wind, is intermittent, that is, it isn’t an alternative to something that works when you need it, let alone all the time; and it is very diffuse, meaning it takes a lot of space to produce a little).

And so we’ve squandered scores of billions time and gain. Yes, billions. So much for “isn’t it time we began investing in…”

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Americans are catching on to the absurdity of the far Left’s “greening” of our economy. In some cases, like the Solyndra scandal, it amounts to the Taxpayer cash being flushed away on economically unsound alternative technologies that we *hope* will someday compete fairly with oil and natural gas. In the case of D.C. this weekend, we received a this picture from a PR event … where a pro-solar sign was literally powered by a gas generator.* How’s that for a metaphor?

* For this story, we have relied on a trusted source. Our tipper says there were several such signs, each powered by gas generator such as the black and yellow box partially obscured by the fence above.

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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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And Watergate wasn’t the defining episode of the Nixon administration. But that’s how desperate Team Obama have become. And with today’s House hearing cancelled after the Solyndra gang phoned in a no-show, methinks this is not the end or even the beginning of the end of what Solyndra will tell us about Obama’s term.

Countering WaPo’s front page story showing deep and intense White House involvement in rushing through $535 million in taxpayer dollars to the brainchild of major Obama contributor George Kaiser, failed solar panel boondoggle Solyndra, today’s E&E Daily has a story (subscription required) “Democrats launch counteroffensive on Solyndra”.

The hand-waiving effort — Schwarzenegger was a fan! A Solyndra exec is a registered Republican! The program Obama abused was originally created by Congress during George W. Bush’s presidency! (untrue, “Sec. 1705″ was a 2009 project in the…stimulus bill…of Henry Waxman (D-CA)) — concludes with the following cry for help, or at least for a good fisking:

Other Democratic leaders were quick to pan the RNC’s attempt to make Solyndra the face of the stimulus effort.

“Solyndra is unfortunate. Did it not work? It didn’t work apparently. But that’s not the face of the Recovery Act,” said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in an interview.

I’m sorry…whose effort to make Solyndra the face of ’stimulus’?

Which other project received — on top of the internal push to rush a half-billion dollars to this “NOT ready for prime time” (per an OMB email) project — personal attention and public promotion by the Energy Secretary, Vice President, and President? But, no, it wasn’t the face of ’stimulus.’

But, what of that whole presidential address, whose details make this claim something less than near-fetched:

“So that’s why we’ve placed a big emphasis on clean energy.  It’s 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.

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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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David Kreutzer of Heritage has a great item up on The Foundry, on WaPo’s remarkable (it was WaPo!) exposé of the miracle Chinese bullet trains actually leaving a trail of, well, leaving fiscal and other wreckage in their wake. He concludes, “Well, the Chinese finally have a green-energy idea worth stealing: arrest government officials who foist overpriced, underperforming, debt-ballooning, money-losing projects on taxpayers.”

In case you missed the WaPo piece, the man in charge of China’s model train set:

“is ruined, and his high-speed rail project is in trouble. … his ministry has run up $271 billion in debt — roughly five times the level that bankrupted General Motors. But ticket sales can’t cover debt service that will total $27.7 billion in 2011 alone. Safety concerns also are cropping up.

Faced with a financial and public relations disaster, China put the brakes on Liu’s program. On April 13, the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability. The Railway Ministry’s tangled finances are being audited. Construction plans, too, are being reviewed.

Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a “moon shot” and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.”

In short, it’s an awful lot like Spain’s wind- and solar program President Obama also longs to impose here.

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By all means, let us pursue the president’s new approach to the budget, the Orwellian ‘reduce spending in the tax code’. But, wherever will we find good examples of wasteful ’spending in the tax code’?

Hey, look here! The Feds are taking your money to create 1,000 jobs! Of course, these jobs wouldn’t exist without this wealth transfer, and are mostly temporary anyway. But, still, it’s only $2 million per temporary job. Guess we’ll make the cost up in volume.

And T. Boone only wants a billion dollars. Then he promises to quit. Really. He’ll be the first.

The Nation also joins in:

[T]he primary problem facing clean alternative energy is the ‘price gap’—they are still more expensive than fossil fuels. As I’ve outlined in these pages previously (see “The Big Green Buy”), economies of scale, along with subsidies and planning, will help close this price gap. Only when clean technologies—like wind, solar, hydropower and electric vehicles—are cheaper than other options will global capitalism make the switch away from fossil fuels.

Of course, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind mostly doesn’t blow so windmills and solar panels require massive redundancy as well as enormous swathes of land, and wind- and solar-powered electricity are just as old as the coal-fired variety, just practical losers. Those are possibly greater challenges than a mere ‘price gap’, and indeed they make this idea of comparing renewables with hydrocarbons as if they were apples to apples endearingly absurd.

But, anyway. While ‘planning’ is euphemistic for preferences and mandates, here you also see green econ 101 amid the author’s ostentatious advertisement of having escaped brushing up on the actual experience and history of these boondoggles.

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Last week President Obama began the blitz which, barring Republican collapse (read on) could last for the next two years, pushing his State of the Union call for American taxpayers to hand over even more billions to underwrite a supposed ‘clean energy’ future.

By chance, I read of this between sessions conferring in London and Brussels with leading experts on the disastrous folly of Europe’s experiment with the ‘clean energy economy’. We know that this is the same disaster that President Obama is now doubling down on as an economic recovery plan because he used to admit as much.

But in his new push the president has toned down the European roots of his model, as well as the planetary salvation rationale for energy rationing. This is because, respectively, the success stories all proved to be black holes which European governments are now trying to walk back, and the public turned against the global warming campaign.

So it was with great amusement that I caught, on my flight back this weekend, some art imitating life in a spectacularly appropriate way. Accountant Leo Bloom revealed to producer Max Bialystock, “under the right circumstances, a producer could actually make more money with a flop than he can with a hit”. Voila! There you have, in a Broadway second, President Obama’s ‘clean energy’ agenda.

Government Electric – once a bastion of American genius now fallen to being no more than a government front company – and the rest of the ‘renewables’ Music Men (to note another apt vehicle) are the Bialystock and Bloom of policy. They seek to make their fortune by producing flops. But since their ‘markets’ are arranged by pals in government and not due to performance, it works. That’s the beauty of it.

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To rephrase President Obama’s State of the Union theme:  “This is our generation’s apparatchik moment.”

Yes, he said “Sputnik” instead, but his actual agenda is about the apparatchik—government by party leaders, bureaucrats and the well-connected.

His agenda is symbolized by his push for “green jobs” as the path to a better future.

Simply put, the green jobs agenda spends billions of taxpayer dollars to destroy existing jobs and replace them with jobs in politically-favored businesses, raising the costs of energy along the way.

The politically-connected win.  Existing job-holders and companies lose.  Home electric bills go up.  Power also costs more for companies, making it more expensive to go into business or to stay in business.

It’s cronyism that is building a political power structure based on false claims about clean green jobs.

It’s economic cannibalism because creating the green jobs requires killing off existing jobs.

As Bloomberg News reported, “Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.”

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A joke making the rounds during my brief, late 1990s stint with General Electric’s ideological and political forerunner, Enron, keyed off of that company’s disastrous energy venture in India and its fabled arrogance. It went, in short, who else would believe they could sell turbines to Indians?

Give it a minute. Then hold that thought.

Last week, to optically set the stage for Tuesday night’s rhetorical pitch for more big government to prop up certain favored losers called the ‘clean energy economy’, President Obama teamed with his BFF — and big-time lobbyist for/vendor to massively increased government mandates — CEO Jeff Immelt of GE for a photo-op at a GE plant in Schenectady, NY.

GE makes a gas turbine there, several of which it has signed a contract for sale to India. So that made a very good backdrop, if for a very confused message.

The logic goes something like this: GE makes renewable energy gizmos, manufacturing jobs for which Obama wants to create here by mandating markets for and otherwise propping them up with taxpayer dollars. Therefore, GE’s economic, non-mandated, efficiency-enhancing fossil fuel turbine is evidence that energy technology innovations are possible and therefore the federal government ought to mandate all sorts of uneconomic ‘renewable’ efficiency killers.

Which reminds us of Enron-style arrogance.

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The anti-energy lobby, surrogates for Big Wind and Big Solar, is now backed into a rhetorical corner in its effort to impose its agenda of protecting the world from the horrors of affordable, abundant energy. Remember, although they say their objective is to use policy to force invention of Flubber or pixie dust to satisfy our future energy abundance, this doesn’t square with their decades of saying that “If  you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it” (green Energy guru Amory Lovins).

Or that it would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child” (green leader, Paul Ehrlich), that “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet” (Eco-writer Jeremy Rifkin). That’s what drives them. They want you limited to stuff that doesn’t and won’t work because it doesn’t and won’t work. But to get you there they swear it will. Despite saying for decades that would actually be their worst nightmare.

You figure out which of their stated positions is the lie. I’ll wait.

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