Townhall...
The
Absent-Minded Energy Secretary
by Debra J. Saunders
Nov 20, 2011
President
Barack Obama likes to brag
that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, won a Nobel Prize in physics.
You would
think that means that Chu is a brainiac who makes shrewd decisions and
is
extremely aware of whatever is happening around him. But as his
testimony
before the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations
Subcommittee
on Thursday revealed, there’s a world of information that escapes Chu’s
notice.
The
subcommittee is investigating
Chu’s decision to make Fremont, Calif., solar power company Solyndra
the first
recipient of a federal energy program loan in September 2009. Two years
and
$528 million later, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, and it looks as if
taxpayers
will not see a dime of it. The Nobel Prize winner’s pet pick was a bust.
Thursday
was supposed to be Chu’s
moment to take responsibility for this high-profile bad “bet” -- as
Obama once
put it. Chu did say, “The final decisions on Solyndra were mine.” Yet
by the
end of the hearing, Chu was using the passive voice and putting the
onus on
other people. As he looked back at the whole thing, Chu said that
“competent
decisions were made by the people in the loan program,” that green
energy is
important and that everyone knew “there were risks.”
If
the White House was pushing for the
Solyndra deal because Obama campaign contribution bundler and frequent
White
House visitor George Kaiser owned an equity firm that backed Solyndra,
it was
news to Chu. Ditto on communications between Solyndra backers and top
White
House operatives. Who knew?
The
Nobel laureate was “not aware” of
staffers’ predictions that Solyndra would go broke, even run out of
cash in
September 2011.
In
September 2009, Chu approved the Solyndra
loan. He clearly missed the Office of Management and Budget staff’s
recommendation that the deal be “notched down” in light of “the
weakening world
market prices for solar generally.” When he showed up at Solyndra’s
groundbreaking, Chu announced, “If you build a better solar panel, the
world
will beat a path to your door.”
As
Rick Perry would say, “oops.”
In
March 2010, PricewaterhouseCoopers
warned that Solyndra’s recurring losses and negative cash flows raised
“substantial doubt about (its) ability to continue as a going concern.”
And
still, Chu was a booster. In May
2010, Obama appeared at a Solyndra event, chatting up Chu’s Nobel
history and
proclaiming, “The true engine of economic growth will always be
companies like
Solyndra.”
A
month later, Solyndra canceled a
planned $300 million public offering.
This
might be a good place to mention
that shortly after winning its first loan guarantee, Solyndra applied
for a
second, this one for $400 million. To its credit, the administration
did not
approve the loan.
By
October, CEO Brian Harrison had
informed the Energy Department that the company was about to lay off
workers.
According to an email from Kaiser’s investment fund, “the DOE ...
requested a
delay until after the election (without mentioning the election).”
Voila.
Solyndra announced it would
shutter one of its plants and lay off 40 workers Nov. 3, the day after
the
election. Chu testified he would not have approved such a political
request.
Now
Chu admits he approved a deal that
allowed investors to put $75 million into Solyndra in order to give the
company
a chance to survive. He acknowledged that the second deal included a
sweetener
that put investors ahead of taxpayers in the payback line that follows
bankruptcy.
Sadly,
when that expensive (for
taxpayers) gambit failed, Solyndra laid off 1,000 workers.
Chu
rejected the notion that
incompetence and politics may have been factors in this
half-billion-dollar
blunder. “It’s extremely unfortunate what happened,” said Chu, “but the
bottom
fell out of the market; it was totally unexpected.”
Rep.
Henry Waxman, D-Calif., came to
Chu’s defense. “We have lost the money,” he announced. “It’s
unfortunate, but
there’s no scandal there.”
No
scandal? In February 2009, former
Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet was so sure he’d get the loan that he set 10
conditions for the administration to meet to help him raise another
$147
million. No. 9: “Fundraising support after conditional commitment:
Steven Chu
visits Solyndra with press interviews (target by end of March).”
Just
who worked for whom?
Read
this and other columns at
Townhall
|