|
Redstate...
Solar
Power Business Model
Unsustainable
Posted by Ben Howe
Thursday, September 1st
The
Obama administration has been
trying to foist green industry on uninterested Americans since he first
stepped
in to office three years ago. So
far,
the efforts have been less than successful.
The Chevy Volt has miserable sales, wind-power
has proven to be
something less than a viable alternative, and now it appears that
reality is
catching up with solar power as well.
Solyndra
is a solar panel maker that
was propped up by the administration having been awarded over half a
billion
dollars in loan guarantees. Now,
the
company is going under and taking all that money and 1,100 employees
jobs with
it.
Solyndra,
a California solar panel
maker, had long been an administration favorite. Over the past two
years,
President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu each had made
congratulatory
visits to the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
The
RNC has released a video that
documents the rhetoric and the reality that has surrounded this big
government
test case:
The
reasons for it’s failure are
simple enough. Consumers
simply haven’t
expressed an interest in paying the exorbitant fees associated with
upgrading
to solar, even with the massive subsidies that are available.
But
solar industry analyst Peter Lynch
said that Solyndra struggled from the beginning with an imbalanced
financial
model. “You make something in a factory and it costs $6, you sell it
for $3,
but you really, really need to sell it for $1.50 to be competitive,”
Lynch said
of Solyndra. “It was an insane business model. The numbers just don’t
work, and
they never did.”
It’s
pretty clear that President Obama
knew that this was the case judging by how much effort he has put into
shutting
down the coal industry in hopes that American’s would have no other
alternative
but to fulfill his dreams of green industry and carbon trading.
I
take no joy in a company going
under, much less the loss of income for those 1,100 people that worked
there. As the real
estate sector
continues to struggle, banks that had received TARP are in danger of
financial
meltdown, publicly financed cars sit on the showroom floor with no
buyers, and
government guaranteed corporations with unsustainable business models
go under
– is it perhaps time to consider that whether it’s TARP, auto bailouts
or
stimulus loans, the market is much better at picking winners and losers
than
Barack Obama or George W. Bush?
Read
it at Redstate
|
