[Above, video from 2012. You decide if John Boehner was drunk as he railed against the Obama administration over Solyndra. -- eds]
Remember when every Republican in Christendom spent a year clogging your email inbox with hair-on-fire news that Solyndra -- the experimental solar panel company that won a $500 million loan guarantee from the Obama administration as part of their multi-billion dollar investment in clean/green energy -- had failed?
Solyndra was a manufacturer of cylindrical panels of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin film solar cells based in Fremont, California. Heavily promoted as a leader in the Clean Energy sector for its unusual technology, Solyndra was not able to compete with conventional solar panel manufacturers of crystalline silicon.
Solyndra was a good-faith investment in a promising clean tech that failed. And, as I recollect, on the scale of Obama Scandals That Are The Worst Thing Anyone Has Ever Done it fell right between the Sekrit Obamacare Plan to Murder Your Sainted White Meemaw and the Tan Suit That Destroyed Democracy, and well behind the overarching Openly Racist Birth Certificate Lunacy.
(Brief aside: Reminder that every one of your Never Trump resistance heroes watched this seditious, eight-year-long GOP racist primal scream unfold right out in the open and still insisted that everything was just fine with their Republican party and the real problem was dirty commies like you and me.)
And the overall program itself has been a huge success:
After Solyndra Loss, U.S. Energy Loan Program Turning A Profit
In 2011, solar panel company Solyndra defaulted on a $535 million loan guaranteed by the Department of Energy. The agency had a few other high-profile bankruptcies, too — electric car company Fisker and solar company Abound among them. But now that loan program has started turning a profit.
Overall, the agency has loaned $34.2 billion to a variety of businesses, under a program designed to speed up development of clean-energy technology. Companies have defaulted on $780 million of that — a loss rate of 2.28 percent. The agency also has collected $810 million in interest payments, putting the program $30 million in the black.
When Congress created the loan program under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it was never designed to be a moneymaker. In fact, Congress imagined there would be losses and set aside $10 billion to cover them...
Well here's what a section of the Republican's $15 billion wall looks like after a downpour in Arizona.
A wall that Mexico was never going to pay for.
A wall exists largely as the infantile, medieval notion of a terrible, tantrum-throwing monster to whip up the racist Republican base.
As one, final Confederate monument thrown up by one, last, Confederate president.
Republished with permission from Driftglass.
