President has repeatedly promised to continue investing taxpayer dollars in “green” tech companies if he is elected to a second term. If the past is any guide, America would be in for a whole lot of taxpayer-funded failures and bankruptcies. In four years, Obama’s investments have racked up 36 flops. As Mitt Romney quipped in the first debate, Obama doesn’t just use the government pick winners and losers — he just picks losers.
This list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but how much was offered. The amount also does not include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which push the amount of money these companies have received from taxpayers even higher.
The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:
- Evergreen Solar ($24 million)*
- SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
- Solyndra ($535 million)*
- Beacon Power ($69 million)*
- AES’s subsidiary Eastern Energy ($17.1 million)
- Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
- SunPower ($1.5 billion)
- First Solar ($1.46 billion)
- Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
- EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
- Amonix ($5.9 million)
- National Renewable Energy Lab ($200 million)
- Fisker Automotive ($528 million)
- Abound Solar ($374 million)*
- A123 Systems ($279 million)*
- Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($6 million)
- Johnson Controls ($299 million)
- Schneider Electric ($86 million)
- Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
- ECOtality ($126.2 million)
- Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
- Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
- Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
- Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
- Range Fuels ($80 million)*
- Thompson River Power ($6.4 million)*
- Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
- LSP Energy ($2.1 billion)*
- UniSolar ($100 million)*
- Azure Dynamics ($120 million)*
- GreenVolts ($500,000)
- Vestas ($50 million)
- LG Chem’s subsidiary Chemical Power ($150 million)
- Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
- Navistar ($10 million)
- Satcon ($3 million)*
*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy.
Those total over $10.2 billion. Now, we need to cross reference those companies to major donors and bundlers.
– Solyndra ended up making tubular bells…
So 51% or so of the companies have all gone under. Of $10,205,900,000.00, $3,790,700,000.00 was offered to companies that have since gone under completely, and the rest are teetering. As Solyndra has shown, our chances of recovering the money actually paid out is nil to low.
I wrote out the numbers to get the effect better. Just saying million or billion doesn’t cut it these days. We need to see the zeros. Or perhaps use the British method of saying Thousand million when speaking of billion. And use the phrase million million to get the effect of trillion. Makes it a little more obvious than a change of the first letters.
Somebody should tell Jon Stewart. I think he said “three.”
No wonder they can’t fund his election this go’round.