The Solar Dole

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Corruption: In the same week a green energy firm that wasted hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars said it was bankrupt, the White House made a multimillion-dollar loan to another solar power project. Madness reigns.

Last week, Solyndra, which builds industrial solar panels in the Bay Area, announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. The company, whose officials and investors visited the White House at least 20 times and have donated to the Obama campaign, chewed through 1,100 employees and piles of other people's money, including $535 million provided by taxpayers, before it finally succumbed to reality.

President Obama, who can't let go of his party's eco-energy fantasy, toured Solyndra's Fremont, Calif., plant last year. He identified the company as an example of the "positive impacts" of his stimulus plan and called it "a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism." The president and the thinkers in his administration dreaming of a green economy merrily claimed Solyndra would eventually employ 4,000.

What made them think this when Solyndra's own accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers considered the company's business model to be shaky and expressed "substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern"?

Learning nothing from the Solyndra crackup and the many other green-energy failures, the White House, also last week, handed out an $852 million loan guarantee to the Genesis Solar Project in California. This 1,950-acre slice of federal land in Riverside County filled with parabolic solar panels is supposed to produce enough power — 250 megawatts — to light, heat and cool more than 48,000 homes.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who apparently has yet to meet a fossil fuel he can like, no matter how cheap and efficient it might be, stands fully behind the Genesis Solar Project. He wants the public to believe that it "will enable the deployment of clean, renewable sources at scale, which will help bring down the cost of solar power in the years to come."

Chu can be as blindly optimistic as he is blind to the facts about energy. Standing behind yet another poor government choice won't tarnish his professional reputation or ruin his career. But the hard lesson to be learned is that the Genesis Solar Project is bound to be another boondoggle.

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How can it not be? If it were a viable project, it would be a magnet for private-sector investment. That it needs government help is an indicator that the market knows it's a venture not worth capitalizing.