It’s Lights Out For Another Solar Firm
Industrial Policy: Another stimulus-backed solar panel
maker, one the president touted in a weekly radio address,
is filing for bankruptcy. The administration’s green-energy
efforts continue to grow a deeper shade of red.
After receiving some $70 million in federal loans, Abound Solar, a Colorado-based firm that was
developing thin-film solar panels, has announced it will follow an earlier Obama administration green
energy failure, Solyndra, into bankruptcy.
Like Solyndra, Abound’s bankruptcy is a bitter echo of the hype generated by President Obama in his
weekly radio address exactly two years ago when he touted his push for a clean energy economy.
Abound Solar, he said, would manufacture advanced solar panels at two new plants, creating more than
2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs at plants in Indiana and Colorado.
Abound apparently wasn’t even helped by last July’s $9.2 million Export-Import Bank loan to support
exports of thin-film solar photovoltaic modules to Punj Lloyd Solar Power Ltd., a company in India building
a 5-megawatt solar project located on a 62.5-acre site near the village of Bap.
Three years ago, when Obama’s Department of Energy started approving roughly $16 billion in federal
loan guarantees for solar energy companies, the DOE agreed to put taxpayers’ money behind startups
that were working on ways to make solar panels cheaper. Two, Solyndra and Abound, have now gone
belly-up.
The other two solar manufacturing companies with loan guarantees, SoloPower and 1366 Rechnologies,
have not actually borrowed any taxpayer money so far. This is probably a good thing as solar energy’s
promise is eclipsed by a real energy boom in oil and natural gas from shale. It is also fortunate for
taxpayers that Abound drew only $70 million out of a $400 million line of credit.
In a January report, Sheryl Attkisson of CBS News counted at least 12 clean-energy companies that were
having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five had
filed for bankruptcy: the junk bond-rated Beacon
.
Power, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES subsidiary Eastern Energy and the now-infamous Solyndra.
Now we have a sixth — Abound Solar.
Ener1, maker of batteries that were supposed to power Obama’s electric car fleet, filed for bankruptcy in
January. Just as American tax dollars have gone to subsidize electric cars made in Finland by Fisker
Automotive, state-of-the-art battery technology developed by Ener1 that was also supposed to rejuvenate
the American auto industry is now owned outright by Boris Zingarevich, a Russian businessman with ties
to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Zingarevich, who was Ener1’s largest shareholder from the beginning in 2002, acquired Ener1 out of
bankruptcy March 30. The company had tapped the country’s top scientists at Argonne National Lab in
Illinois, and Washington pledged up to $118 million in stimulus funds from an administration that has
grabbed American taxpayers by the throat. Another $80 million in state and local incentives was
dedicated to help Ener1 produce cutting-edge battery technology for electric cars and the U.S. military.
Now that technology is owned by a Russian tycoon.
Speaking of the push to promote green energy projects, Daniel Kish, senior vice president for policy at
the Institute for Energy Research, said in a recent interview with Cybercast News Service that “without
government subsidies or mandates, none of these energy sources exist, they just simply won’t. . . . These
energy sources are not as efficient as the sources of energy that the marketplace has picked and the
consumers have picked to run the country.”
“Hindsight is always 20-20,” Obama told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News after Solyndra closed its
doors. “It went through the regular review process. And people felt like this (Solyndra) was a good bet.”
As the latest in a string of green energy flops, Abound Solar shows Obama has quite a green-energy
gambling addiction.
This is an administration that insists on picking winners and losers in the market, with an unenviable
record of choosing the latter. Fortunately, the American people get to pick their own winners and losers in
November.