For those who are vaguely aware of the Solyndra scandal but don’t know just how deep Obama and Biden stepped in it, here’s a quick video put out by IER (a free-market energy think tank for which I’m the economist).
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/18586/quick-video-on-the-solyndra-scandal/
Quick Video on the Solyndra Scandal
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Excellent!
There is really demand for these products out there. You just have to force everyone to buy them, that’s all.
Solar is fine for heating your pool. I don’t see how it can power a grid though. I wonder if people will see the news of the FBI raids and think “white collar crime is why the company failed” instead of asking whether big solar is really possible for the grid.
That said, another problem with stuff like this is that it keeps people hooked on State protected utilities. Similar to codes, it manipulates people into thinking that independently powering your home with something like micro-solar isn’t worth attempting and they should just stay dependent on Big Gov-Big Corp instead.
Try not to think about it too deeply.
These guys in government are out to make a buck. They are in it for the power and the opportunities for profit from their position.
Solyndra is one of those scams, one of those opportunities. It’s a half a billion rip off of the country and I am sure that a huge portion of that money disappeared into some goon’s pocket. Completely and utterly crooked from the beginning.
You don’t need the government do that, pure and simple engineering and mathematics will tell you that ‘green energy’ is all bullshit.
If you, personally, want to exist off the grid.. then it’s perfectly possible. But it’s going to require a huge amount of sacrifices and it’s going to cost you a lot more in both the short and long term. No being able to run a full sized laundry machine. No longer being able to have a big screen TV or a desktop computer… you’ll have to downsize to laptops and small displays. No more being able to use electricity to heat your home in the winter or cook food. Recreational Vehicle type refrigerators, etc etc etc. Depending on what you want to spend you can get away with some luxuries we now take for granted, but the more you want the more it’s going to cost you. And it’s going to cost you far more then just a buck or two a kilowatt.
Nobody is going to make a profit by forcing the public to pay 300-400% more for energy then they do now while expecting them to live a 1910′s era lifestyle. It’s just not going to happen.
There is no hope for profit. The technology is just not here yet. Solar energy or biological processes are the best hope for sustainable energy, but these things are still decades away. Oil will be able to compete with them, even with ever increasing consumption of energy, for the next couple hundred years at least.
“Green Energy” could exist right now for nitch markets. For people wanting something unique or different with their life style and industrial applications with unique requirements. Or backups for emergency power and stuff like that.
But there is very little hope for real progress. People want to believe in this stuff so much that they are willing to ignore any realities and are happy to force other people to throw money at their pipe dreams at the point of a gun. There are enough people dishonest and crooked enough to cash in on this stupidity and selfishness that they will suck the life out of the industry. Their crooked ways will push legit businesses and technology out of the way… people will be happy to give money to fantasies instead of realities, especially when it’s not their money.
Crooked asshats like the Obamas and Bushes along with scams like Solyndra will be there at every step to milk as much money out of the system as humanly possible. Then they will happily let the ‘true believers’ take the fall and be the ones that get dragged into courts and set up as fall guys to fulfil the public’s lust to see accountability through punishment.
As a result the government’s involvement will set back progress by 50 years or more. But it is hard to care when you are a politician pulling in hundreds of millions in untaxed profit for yourself, friends, and family.
Why is the government funding this in the first place?
When VC ‘s fund startups, they only expect 9 out of 10 to fail. However, they expect the one that succeeds to carry the rest, To do this the usually have a majority equity share. Here the Feds are guaranteeing the loan. At best they will get their money back – private gains, socialized losses.
The second reason why this is bad is that subsidizing an emerging technology almost guarantees that it will fail – the company has no incentive to improve their technology to make it competitive.
However, to look on the bright side, very high paying jobs were created – the bankruptcy attorneys are charging over $1,000 an hour.
The reason why it failed is cause the administration’s people and the President are scientifically illiterate, unlike investors who actually care about the financial risk and look at the scientific viability of such green hype.
The reason it failed was because it was suppose to fail. A huge portion of that 535 million disappeared into a black hole.
Green energy scams like Solyndra only exist for short-medium turn profit. If the company actually produced anything of value it would of been completely by accident.
From the con-artist’s perspective floating loans for a ‘new technology’ company is normally a good idea. Since the company cannot be expected to be producing anything of value for a decade or so then it’s easy to hide the money disappearing. Then when the company finally fails the con artist can shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of:
(on a interview in PBS:)
“Well I have to say that the science is sound and the research we were doing was spot-on, but the lack of public awareness combined with the powerful lobbyists of entrenched interests (*cough big oil*cough*) just proved to be a much bigger barrier then we anticipated. In a healthier non-partisan political environment (*cough*republicans suck*cough*) we probably could of received the funding needed to push through, but that is not the reality of the situation we face today. I just feel sorry for the baby polar bears and starving aids-infected children in Africa, because they are the ones that will ultimately pay most for our country’s selfishness”
The only thing that Obama and friends fucked up on was that they were probably hoping they could cash in on the stock market or cheaper loans to keep the ponzi scheme running for a few more years. Economy was a lot worse then they expected. They probably saw that trying to keep this company floating on bad loans was going to be too obvious for the public to ignore, so they let it. Now they are just in the process of hanging the stooges they put in to run the scam out to dry.
Nobody wants to put this much effort into creating a cash cow only to see it go tits up so quickly, but such is the economic realities of our time. It just was not meant to last.
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