Where Our $500 Million Went: Solyndra Glass Tubes Used as Modern Art
WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE OTHER TUBES?
Here’s where the story takes a tragic turn. If SOL Grotto has only 1,368 of the estimated 24 million high-tech unused Solyndra tubes, what happened to the rest of them?
The answer is not entirely clear at this stage, but we do have some clues.
Greg Smestad attended the Solyndra bankruptcy auction back in December of last year, and filed this astonishing report about what he saw:
The stress that Solyndra was under earlier this year seemed to go unchecked by both U.S. federal officials, who had granted the more than $535 million loan guarantee, as well as private investors and members of the Solyndra Board of Directors. I found evidence that the cracks in the business were in plain view almost a year ago. Like Christmas past, they are just under the surface but appear unexpectedly when all else is dark.
I saw the evidence during the first (live) auction that took place in November. It was still there on December 12 and yet everyone walked by without noticing its significance. There were crates and pallets, cubes about two meters on a side, stamped with part number, origin and production date of their contents. The one-meter, uncoated Solyndra cylindrical glass tubes inside the boxes were manufactured by Schott Rohrglas in Germany and represent one of the most critical items in the supply chain for the cylindrical PV panels that were made by Solyndra until the company went bankrupt in September.
Each box contained 2000 tubes on which vacuum deposition machines coated a thin film layer of the CIGS PV semiconductor. This smaller CIGS-coated tube was placed inside a larger, uncoated, glass cover tube, that I saw in neighboring crates and pallets, and the two concentric tubes were sealed at the ends with a metal-to-glass seal much like a fluorescent tube. The room contained an array of 20-by-25 boxes containing 800,000 to 1 million tubes in unopened crates and pallets. They were neatly arranged in rows by month: January 2011, February 2011, March 2011, April 2011 and so on.
Had I walked into this factory in early 2011, I would have undoubtedly asked why the expensive, high purity glass tubes were coming in but not being used. This represents a serious mismatch in the supply chain between finished goods produced, Solyndra solar panels, and the raw materials coming in.
But it gets much worse. After nobody bought the tubes at the auction, Solyndra started discarding them crate by crate into Dumpsters:
At Solyndra’s sprawling complex in Fremont, workers in white jumpsuits were unwrapping brand new glass tubes used in solar panels last week. They are the latest, most cutting-edge solar technology, and they are being thrown into dumpsters.
Forklifts brought one pallet after another piled high with the carefully packaged glass. Slowly but surely it all ended up shattered.
And it’s not a few loads. Hundreds of thousands of tubes on shrink-wrapped pallets will meet a similar demise.
A local CBS affiliate news helicopter captured video of the horrifying and seemingly pointless destruction of the tubes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVCHy91O8do
Sickening to watch. Solyndra convinced the bankruptcy judge that the resale value of their expensive techno-tubes was lower than the cost to warehouse them, and so got permission to simply throw them away.
This photo montage of Solyndra workers throwing the glass tubes into Dumpsters was compiled from freezeframes of the video above.
But all is not lost! Some of the tubes seem to have been rescued. In addition to the 1,368 tubes salvaged and used in the SOL Grotto exhibit, the aforementioned Greg Smestad also seems to have saved some from destruction, and is now promoting their use as flower vases (seriously):
He also maintains a Picasaweb photo album which shows exactly how the tubes were supposed to be used in Solyndra solar arrays, in case you’re curious to see what their original purpose was.
Do you want your own Solyndra souvenir? Good news: at least two companies, Lucky Equipment and Sol Ideas, saved some of the tubes from oblivion and are now selling them to the public (in bulk, unfortunately, not one by one).
UPDATE: Ronald Rael bought the tubes used in the exhibit from JIT Transportation a shipping and storage firm in San Jose, which ended up with 8 million of them and an unpaid bill when Solyndra went bankrupt. Although JIT Transportation does not advertise the tubes for sale, they are apparently still trying to find a way to unload them, so you might try giving them a call as well.
Bonus Links:
- Complete description of the Natural Discourse installation.
- Photos from the artists’ Facebook page showing the SOL Grotto being built and the tubes installed.
- Many more photos of the tubes inside the grotto on “ron_toad”‘s Flickr page.
- Solyndra: Its technology and why it failed
So this is what became of our $535 million: Some glass tubes stuck in a box in the middle of a garden:
Goodbye tubes! Goodbye Solyndra! Goodbye fiscal sanity!
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The San Jose Mercury News on August 22 published an article describing the political fallout from this post going viral and becoming national news.
How soon until someone tells Greg Smestad “he didn’t build that”? Good on him for trying to make something out of the disaster.
Thanks to PJ Media and Zombie for a well-researched article about the SOL Grotto. Thanks also to Bianchi_roadie for the compliment. Please forgive me in that I do not understand what is meant by, “How soon until someone tells Greg Smestad “he didn’t build that”?” Let me try to tell everyone what I’ve been trying to do and what is in my mind. I created the Glass Tube vases and had several tubes made into a neon “O,” because I wanted real artists to pick up on it and convey what needs to be taught. I have not sold a single tube and selling something is not my real purpose. I know several people who have purchased large quantities of the tubes in hopes that some greater use could be found for them. As my website describes, I am a scientist who has worked in the field of solar energy for over 20 years. I have a deep and direct experience with peer review for both DOE and Venture Capitalists (think Bain Capital). My website is part tongue-in-cheek and part a desperate attempt at reaching out and letting people know that the tubes are still available. Ironically, I reached out to LBNL and high officials there in hopes that they could find a more technical and suitable use for the tubes. There is more to be said on the topic and I will leave this for later.
Great to see you commenting here, Greg!
As to your question, “I do not understand what is meant by, “How soon until someone tells Greg Smestad “he didn’t build that” ” — it’s a sarcastic reference to Obama’s recent speech in which he scolded entrepreneurs for selfishly imagining that they are responsible for building up their own businesses, summed up by the president’s now-infmaous signature line, “You didn’t build that!” I think Bianchi_roadie was making a joke that Obama was going to lean in and remind you that (in Obama’s opinion) you shouldn’t get any credit for being entrepreneurial. Of course we’re in sympathy with your efforts, and we’re scoffing at critics who belittle small buisnesses and entrepreneurs. Heck, I even give a thumbs up to the artists who repurposed the tubes; even though I probably don’t agree with all their political views, I applaud re-purposing and at least making an attempt to salvage something of use or value from an otherwise wasteful disaster.
I hope you can find some educational, scientific, artistic or profitable use for all those tubes! More power to ya.
Greg, since you’re here, perhaps you can answer some of the questions I could never fully resolve – - you seem better informed about the tubes than just about anyone:
- How many unused tubes were there in total at the time of bankruptcy?
- How many were destroyed or discarded into Dumpsters or recycled?
- How many were bought by scavenging entrepreneurs such as yourself and Lucky Equipment?
- How many were thereby left over or remain unaccounted for?
- Do you know from where exactly the SOL Grotto artists obtained the tubes that they used?
Any help you could provide answering these questions would be most appreciated — the world wants to know!
lotsa luck with that one, Zombie.
Thanks Zombie (I never thought I’d ever write that). About 2 million tubes were at Solyndra and about 8 to 15 million more were stranded at warehouses in the San Francisco Bay area. The media didn’t ever report on those, but I am in contact with several people who purchased them from that source. One guy wrote me today, “I recently sold 10 pallets (20,000 tubes), and have actually made a small profit on that portion of the glass tubes.” Some time ago, another guy wrote, “I currently have 50 pallets of Alcan/Amcor 22mm [OD] and 50 pallets of Schott 15 mm glass. I can get a few hundred more 22 mm on short notice as well. There are no more than the 50 15 mm [OD] pallets available.” I should note that these guys demonstrate that there is an aftermarket for the tubes. After the first CBS 5 video, several people contacted me and I’ve been exploring the story. CBS 5 in S.F. aired a follow-up (2nd) video showing some pallets of glass tubes at Solyndra being shipped off to be melted and recycled, but only about half of them were. The pallets in the former building 3 parking lot (first shown in the CBS 5 video) are still there and I’ve photographed them recently. The owners of the building are stuck with them. See my updated Picassa site for the tube vases for details and more answers. I will check on a few things, and with a few people, and answer you more fully later. There is, and will be, a silver lining to the Solyndra story.
Zoombie,
The answer to many of your questions in my comments here and in the recent news at the Mercury News site:
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_21376919/solyndras-glass-tubes-find-second-life-modern-art
well TBH every one of us owns those tubes and none of us get to use them.
send me a vase, will look at it and ponder the stupidity of our DOE.
I paid for those tubes. Send mine to me for my purposes. What gives you the right to confiscate them for your purposes?
I want my damned tube, now!!
Good luck with that. I’m still waiting for the GM car I paid for that I don’t want anyway because they’re cr*p.
Dear Curlyhammed,
You are correct. I have no right to confiscate the glass tubes or anything else owned by someone else, and I have have not removed or taken the tubes from Solyndra or the warehouses it used. I have certainly not profited, unless you count the knowledge I have gained. The 50 tubes in my possession were purchased by one of my contacts (see my prior comments herein) from one of the warehouses that Solyndra contracted with to store them. These warehouses are among Solyndra’s debtors and they sold the glass tubes to clear floor space for their businesses and recover some of their losses. The tube bundle was delivered to me so that I can study them and contact people interested in re-using the large number of tubes that were once available. My web site, mentioned by Zombie in his excellent article, was one result of my efforts along these lines. Like his article, my goal is to inform and enlighten the public so they are aware of what has happened. That said, if you contact me via my Sol Ideas web site, described in Zombie’s reply herein and within his article above, you can give me your address and we can work out a fair price for shipping a blank glass tube to you or anyone else who would like them. Keep in mind that it is just an ordinary, common, uncoated Soda Lime glass tube, not unlike a bottle (I have had them chemically analyzed) and am preparing a scientific paper on the Solyndra PV panel optics and performance. The glass tubes is not a solar panel itself. The real thing that you are getting for the money you “paid” (for the DOE Solyndra Loan Guarantee, each American is out about $1-2 dollars) is Zombie’s article and [things like] my web site so that you and other citizens can have the tools to learn how to prevent another failure like Solyndra. Keep in mind that there are, however, deeper issues – dealing with the peer review process – that go beyond who will be President of the U.S. in 2013. It will make little difference who is elected if the basic peer-review process in the public, private and Federal sectors remains opaque, susceptible and weak. I have served as a reviewer for both VCs and the DOE, and can speak directly from that experience (see my web site for the government’s own reports on the review process). The field of Solar Energy, in which I have worked for over 20 years, has been damaged by how Solyndra has been handled. In studying the tubes and putting together my web site, I have used my own time and money to make sure that those interested and engaged have a better chance of understanding things. Keep in mind that when the DOE stepped aside to allow investors to try to rescue it with approximately $75M, it gave Solyndra the rights to its physical property and IP. This resulted in the sad truth that you, me and the rest America is last in line for what it is due. Lastly, see this – 02/13/2012, Docket #618
Order Authorizing And Approving The Abandonment Of Additional Glass. (related document(s) 251, 581, 615)
Certification of Counsel With Respect to Order Authorizing and Approving the Abandonment of Additional Glass (related document(s)251, 581) Filed by Solyndra, LLC.
01/30/2012 #581
Notice of Service /Debtors’ Notice Abandoning Additional Glass [Objection Deadline: 2/6/12]
Source:
https://www.solyndra-info.com/CourtFilings.aspx
Quite a thorough and excellent reply, but I feel compelled to let you know that Curlyhammed was being sarcastic. If you hung out at political blogs enough, you’d understand the tone, which is quite common on sites like this — basically along the lines of, “Hey where’s my bailout, dammit?” Of course, the commenter isn’t actually expecting a bailout, he’s just sardonically commenting on the transparently unfair and nepotistic way the government operates. In light of all this, Curlyhammed wasn’t actually demanding that you personally send him a tube. Though, hopefully, he might be inclined to buy one from you as a sort of political souvenir.
————————————-
On a completely different topic: Since you’re an expert on solar energy, perhaps you can answer this question about Solyndra-style panels vs. normal flat panels, a question that has long bothered me since I first read of the Solyndra technology:
Let’s just say for the sake of discussion that a solar panel is 2 meters x 2 meters = 4 square meters.
Now, we place a standard flat solar panel in the desert, and right next to it we place a Solyndra-style panel with curved cylindrical components. In this example, the cylindrical panel doesn’t have big gaps as Solyndra panels did, but instead is as tightly packed as it can be — cylinders abutting cylinders.
Again, in this idealized comparison, the coating/receptor/whatever is identical in both panels — say, CIGS solar cells.
Now, what I can’t grasp is how the cylindrical tubes could manage to extract more energy from the sunlight than the flat panel could.
Because in any given area (4 square meters in this case), there is only a given amount of photons hitting the solar cells coming from the sun. The number of photons, or if you don’t want to get down to the quantum level, the total amount of solar energy — remains constant, regardless of which type or shape of panels are placed within it.
Thus, the photons could only liberate a certain amount of electrons via the photoelectric effect, regardless of what “shape” or how curved, slanted or distorted the receiving panel is. You can’t increase output by altering the shape of the surface of any 4-square-meter receiving panel — at least in my understanding.
As a fallacious counter-example to prove my point, a person could make a 4-square-meter CIGS panel with all sorts of curves and slants and peaks and valleys, hoping to “catch” extra rays, but even if you thereby doubled the actual surface area of the panel due to its distortion, you still are only going to get the same number of incoming photons, so the resulting power output will always remain the same. Obviously what would happen with any distorted panel is that any portion that is by chance pointing more directly toward the sun will necessarily by the rules of topology be balanced out by an equal area inversely cast more into shadow or pointing away from the sun at a more oblique angle, so the end result will always be pretty much identical to a flat panel.
The only way that a distorted panel could catch more photons is by having peaks that cast shadows outside the 4-square-meter area, “stealing” light from outside the experiment’s parameters. But in a real-world application, each panel would then cast a shadow on the next panel over, and therefore on an overall basis, an array of cylindrical or distorted panels will tend to converge toward the energy output of standard flat panels, the bigger the array gets.
The only way that I can see that a Solyndra panel could liberate 7% more electrons than a flat panel of the same material is that, being thicker, the Solyndra panel casts a shadow from the edge furthest from the sun, thereby snagging a few extra photons that would have missed the flat panel. 7% sounds about right, at most. But that isn’t an increase in efficiency, it’s just grabbing more photons by casting a shadow on the surrounding area.
So, as far as I can tell, the entire Solyndra concept is a topological fallacy: You can’t cause more photons to exist where only a certain amount existed before, just by distorting the receiver. If Solydra panels catch more rays at oblique angles, then they necessarily will catch fewer rays at direct angles. Overall, it’s simply got to even out, not counting the trailing edge where some extra rays are snagged by casting a larger shadow.
Have I made my scenario clear, hopefully? So my question is: Where am I wrong?
I’m not talking about the difference between CIGS or silicon or other technologies; I’m talking about, all things being equal technology-wise, a distorted panel is simply incapable of liberating more electrons than a flat panel, just by simple logic and simple geometry.
As someone with 20 years of experience in the field, can you explain what the flaw is in my reasoning? Or is it entirely correct? And if it is correct, how could such an obvious point be missed by the reviewers and everyone else judging the Solyndra technology?
Dear Zoombie,
Thanks very much for your explanation of Curlyhammed’s intent. That’s two for two that I haven’t gotten. To briefly answer your question about efficiency, let me first state that you have two assertions – One is that a series of spaced, parallel solar absorber tubes cannot be more efficient (based on footprint area), in terms of solar conversion efficiency, than a standard flat-plate PV module. The other is that it was possible to know before the DOE granted the loan guarantee how the concept performed. You are correct on both counts, but one can’t link the two things together to prove the latter from the former. First, let’s recall that the angle of the incoming sunlight changes during the day, and year, and one can intercept more light if you point the PV module towards the light (it falls off as the cosine of the angle). Your description matches the case for d/D6 = 1 in Fig. 9 of the NASA/DOE paper that you can download at my web site. That is for the direct light that reaches the front of the tubes. Solyndra’s thinking, however, was that you can skip a tube and save on materials by allowing d/D6 = 2. The tubes shadow each other in the early morning and late afternoon, but they behave as if they track the sun, without moving, by having a different part of the cylinder face the sun and become the primary power producer at different times of the day (note that the long tube axis is oriented N-S). Now the space in between the tubes is shown in Fig. 5, and this allows light to impinge upon a white-painted roof (diffuse reflectivity or albedo = 0.7-0.9). A good deal of that backscattered light reaches the underside of the tubes. See my Picassa albums for the 3D geometry. For d=2D6 (every other tube removed), the gain at noon is at most 70%, as shown in Fig. 11. Adding Fig. 9 to Fig. 11 gives a total output of 1.7x at noon, where 2x would be “perfect”. This could easily be achieved with a curved “U” or “W” shaped specular (mirror) reflector behind each tube, with (again) every other tube removed. This can be expensive, but it has been done for many years for evacuated solar thermal tubes based on the work of Roland Winston of Univ. of Merced and is based on a CPC or non-imaging solar concentrator. Solyndra created a lossy derivate of that concept and applied it to solar electric panels (aka, PV modules). Just today, undergrad. students at Santa Clara University demonstrated a computer model based on this paper/concept and we are comparing it to data we’ve taken on actual Solyndra modules. The fit is quite good, but more work needs to be done to answer some basic questions. Better peer review, and better questions asked of the applicant, could have uncovered this paper (it took me 1/2 hr.) and this could have led to better expectations about when, where and how the concept would outperform a flat plate. Now the name of the game is cost per unit energy, and to get that you can look at my “The Basic Economics of Photovoltaics for Vacuum Coaters” tutorial freely available at: http://www.solideas.com/bio/pubs.html
Where Solyndra fell on its face is the incremental (additional) cost of the production for what is a marginal improvement in energy collected (in practice, the 1.7x is closer to 1.4x). Still, there MAY be niche markets where the concept makes sense and so we are exploring this theoretically and experimentally in a post-mortem peer review. History is littered with good ideas that were poorly executed. Stay tuned for results that will be published. The fact that I found the NASA/DOE paper and many others supports your second assertion.
Wow, thanks for the very detailed reply. I’ll do my best to wrap my non-techincal mind around it.
The key phrase is undoubtedly “the name of the game is cost per unit energy,” whereby the small increase in output of a Solyndra panel in no way recompenses the MUCH larger cost to make the panel in the first place. Add in the extra expense and hassle of installing mirrors under the panels, or at a minimum limiting the potential installation spots only to those place with a high albedo or reflectivity, which from what you say seems to be necessary to make Solyndra panels viable at all, and it should have been obvious from the start that highly eccentric panels like this would only be suitable for a niche market at best. If price was no object, and if one had complete control over the installation zone — such as in a subsidized new LEED-certified “green” building project with design parameters specifically made to accommodate panels like this — then Solyndra panels might be appropriate. But under real-world conditions in which someone wants to slap a panel on a pre-existing roof or building, which might have dark asphalt shingles or tar or brick or dark paint or any number of other materials with poor reflectivity, then Solyndra panels would not be appropriate — which is most of the time.
Another detail I never seen mentioned: The very nature of the Solyndra panel design seems much more delicate and breakable compared to a standard flat panel design, so that in the long run I suspect Solyndra panels over the years would have experienced a much higher breakage rate or damage rate. A Frisbee or a small branch could land on a flat panel and probably cause no damage at all; but the same Frisbee or branch seems very likely to crack or shatter any exposed self-supporting glass tube with no protection or backing. Consequently, I imagine that over years and decades Solyndra panels would have a much higher breakdown or replacement rate, adding even more to their true cost.
None of this would matter to me or the average person if Solyndra remained a privately financed firm; I’d wish them luck and hope that they succeed — but if they fail, it’d be of no concern to me because I was not an investor. It’s only because the government acted as VC on a risky investment that everyone’s up in arms.
Greg,
How can I purchase some of these tubes?
In case Greg doesn’t see your comment — here’s how:
Go to Greg’s site and click on the email link where it says “A limited supply of the glass tubes are currently available for distribution worldwide. To inquire about prices and receive a preliminary quote, please contact us at…..” etc.
If the asses had put them on frakking e-bay they could have at least gotten a few bucks apiece.
Yes, someone could have done that but since it was the taxpayers’ money that was at risk no one gave a damn. This outcome is pretty consistent when government makes “investments.”
Well, none of this should come as a great shock, at least to those who understand that the Thug-in-Chief is used to performing heists, even in broad daylight!
Therefore, my blog commentary is very much on point,detailing the thuggish tactics of the Obama regime – ‘Barack Hussein Obama’s Deconstruction Plans…Green-Wise Via The Economy…Disarming The Citizens Via Gun Control’,
and ‘A Double Crime…Picking The Public’s Pockets…And Enriching/Validating Illegal Aliens…Courtesy of the Thief-in-Chief’ – http://www.adinakutnicki.com .
Exactly.
They should have ended up at the Chihuly Museum of Glass in Tacoma.
They would have been more appropriate in The Museum of Bad Investments.
They are the latest, most cutting-edge solar technology, and they are being thrown into dumpsters.
Someone should run this by the “reduce, reuse, recycle” fascists, just to post the reax on YouTube.
I don’t remember exactly, but I seem to recall that these were made of some specially formulated glass, and probably can’t be recycled. They’re going to end up in a landfill for eternity.
Make a heck of a bong, just sayin’.
YEA; RIGHT.
Good one and probably that is their highest margin use.
This is what happens when lefties try to run a business. Utter, breath-taking, all-encompassing stupidity.
No wonder they don’t think it’s possible without cheating.
Uptinkles.
I think you mean “uptwinkles.”
“Uptinkles” is something they practice at the Up Your Alley Fair.
I thought they uptinkled there. Ever heard of an English “piss up”? It’s not what you think.
Zombie,
Good work, more.
Takes lots of facts to over come the lies the msm paints in the heads of millions.
The cure, facts, you have them, use them.
Keep up the great work.
Wins so far:
1. Al Gore gone to ground/underground.
2. John Kerry reduced to Obama’s shadow non-goverment.
3. Nov. 17/19 on Wattsupwiththat reviewing the Climate Gate e-mails some one set free.
4. 2010 Congressional elections
5. Ted Cruz headed for the U.S. Senate
The msm can not lie all the facts away.
Keep up the great work.
taxfreekiller
The MSM may not be able to lie all the facts away, but they can help construct a complete alternate-reality universe where “progressives” can drift and dream in their own personal fact-matrix. The endgame will come down not to who “wins the battle” but who can attract more citizens into the different competing fact-spaces.
Luckily for us, leftists think their universe is the only one, and do not even know they are losing millions of former captives through the Tea Party Wormhole.
I was just having a conversation about that yesterday. As long as the left continues to believe that their cultural competition is social conservatism, they’re going to get blindsided. They don’t see the cultural potency of libertarianism. Libertarianism is going to be the next “cool”. Obama’s doing a fine job of making socialism look nerdy.
Ya, still around.
Spending lots of time with some of my 1966 igloowhite install guys down on the border walking light at night. We have some very intersting interactions with the others down there in those peoples woods.
The fact the border is wide open is a very odd fact some say.
tfk
Perhaps you should consider building the solar-powered burrito-dispensing bike path and bilingual library-fence along the border, as envisioned by Ronald Rael, the same guy who made the SOL Grotto Solyndra tube display.
Zombie, I weep for your state (as well as my “grad school state”).
Let me suggest the next “art” installation: an old-fashioned pillory for those responsible for the Solyndra fiasco.
There is some kind of weird irony that the tubes end up in a display at Berkely.
Criminal behaviour but nobody went to jail.
If they were retrieved from the garbage, then the the law would recognize it as belonging to whomever retrieved it. Public garbage containers are considered free for people to retrieve items insofar as they are not harming other people’s privacy or engaging in otherwise prohibited behavior.
The key to this discussion is “public garbage” containers. In the government for example, it is forbidden to pick through the trash/garbage containers to claim things for private use. You can claim them for use for another government purpose, at the same or another government agency, but they cannot be claimed for priviate use. This prevents people from “throwing away” government property so that others can pull stuff out of the trash and take it home. You can’t even pull out broken material.
Usable material, at least in the DoD, must go to the Defense Reutilization Marketing Office (DRMO). It is a warehouse type of operation, where other government agencies can go and get usable material for free. Eventually usable items that are not claimed by another government agency are sold at auction.
Yes, but numerous lawsuits have confirmed that when a private individual or corporation discards something, they no longer can claim ownership of it, and whoever fishes it out of the trash has the right to keep it. The applies even to personal information in your outdoor trash bin; many of the suits were against papparazzi who dug through celebrities’ trash cans looking for juicy scandal material; the celebrities sued, and lost. The rulings came down: if you throw it away, then it is no longer yours to control. (In the private sector, at least.)
I am still wondering what the glass tubes and a plywood building are doing in a botanical garden. I guess the definition of “botanical garden” can be whatever they say it is.
Hell, they could have done what people do around here with unwanted stuff: put it out the by road with a sign that says “FREE”!
Better yet, just put an ad on craigslist that said,
“FREE: 6-foot-long glass tubes. Good for bongs, proctology exams, pretentious art projects. 24 million tubes, in crates. U pick up, at 47488 Kato Road, Fremont.”
If the ad was posted at noon, they’d all be gone by 3pm.
Too bad Harry Partch isn’t still around. Could you imagine the musical instruments he could make out of those?
The Solyndraphone! Love it!
Sort of like a marimba, but made of hollow glass tubes instead of bamboo.
The Solyimba?
There are two different Solyndra-based instruments:
- The Solimba is a glass-tube marimba; and
- The Solyndraphone is more like a pipe-organ/harspichord, in which a keyboard activates felt-covered mallets to strike graduated glass tubes.
I can definitely visualize Partch playing the Solyndraphone.
I’m sure you could also come up with something like Ben Franklin’s armonica.
They’re useful in more than ideophone form. Depending on the tone-generating geometry, they could be employed as organ pipes, flutes, whistles, or assembled as mega-calliopes. Who could resist a file of the new brightly-colored Kenworth tractors parading down El Camino Real, each with an air compressor and thousands of Σολυντρα-Καλλιοπι tubes arrayed in banks on the trailer, tootling “Obama’s Going to Lead Us” in diabolical harmony?
!!!!!
I have to wonder why no one is in prison for this? This type of scam could not all be incompetence. There has to be some fraud involved.
What am I saying, it’s Black Panthers and Fast & Furious corruption all over again.
Come on November.
It’s not that malevolent. It’s just that nobody in the Obama administration has ever worked for a living in a productive business, and they wholly lack the imagination required in the mechanical engineering field for the design of new processes and mechanisms, nor among artists for new creations. They’re also ignorant of the economic interconnections between businesses, and of the possibilities that a lavish store of beautifully built materials can present to a smart individual (not political-smart as in ‘smart growth’, but really smart about the real world where stuff is manufactured and profitably sold).
And the Solyndra people relied on enriching themselves via the financial tube they had stuck into the Obama administration, and were less concerned about the details of the process they had first bought as the bait.
And without Lucky Industries and the others, we’d have seen their languid unconcern allow the entire stash of politically now-worthless tubes be offloaded as a dead loss.
– Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Turn into a beehive so we can get some honey for our money.
Your “beehive” notion gave me an even better idea: Solyndra Ant Farms!
Put a queen ant in each tube, and you can watch the colony bustling to and fro from all angles!
Solyndra had been rejected in the Bush admin. as a bad place to put taxpayer cash.
The company was backed by investment funds linked to George Kaiser, a major Obama bundler/fundraiser.
Chu was trying to give Solyndra another $400+ million ( in addition to the original $535 million) in loan guarantees as the company was going down the drain.
No one’s gone to jail and Chu still has his job.
How many billions in not ready for prime time boondoggles has this DC crowd of incompetent ideologues shoveled down the drain ?
Should have them delivered & dumped cod to Chu &/or the WH. What a great front page photo that would make.
I’m thinking the title should be “Taxpayers S.O.L. Grotto” (grotto, really??) because we paid for that foolishness. What a waste! >:-(
NObama 2012. The Rebirth of Capitalism in America to follow. Thank God!
Solyndra: gateway to the past. Years ago, an accountant friend of mine told me of a bottling plant in one of the Soviet bloc nations. Since the plant was built in the middle of nowhere, with commercial access unavailable, the managers built a second plant nearby to receive the thousands of bottles produced in the first, where they were crushed and sent back to produce more bottles, to be crushed, returned, produced once more, and so on – recycling at its purest. Moscow was not interested in sales, only in the paperwork declaring official figures of production, which could be varied to give the appearance of new orders. In an opposite situation, although amounting to the same thing, he also toured an aircraft factory with a single commercial transport plane on the production line, although here the paperwork showed hundreds being produced each year.
Your anecdote reminds of the the infamous Soviet “left boot factory”: In order to speed up production, Russian bureaucrats ordered one factory to make nothing but left boots, and the adjacent factory to only make right boots, which would then be combined into pairs; it was more efficient that way. The right boot factory was subsequently closed for some reason, but no one ever gave the order for the left boot factory to stop producing. So for years they churned out millions of left boots with no matching right boots. They stocked the left boots up in inventory warehouses for the right boots to be eventually manufactured — which (needless to say) they never were. But those left boot factory workers exceeded their quota — Bravo, comrades!
The stockpiled Solyndra tubes are crony capitalism’s version of the left boot.
Central planning, the Obama administration’s wet dream.
Victor Suvorov, the pen name of a Cold War era defector from the Soviet Union, told a personal story about the glories of Soviet Central Planning from the 1960s. Gosplan, the agency that did the central planning, was in the habit of getting fertilizers made in large batches. Essentially, they’d dedicate an entire large chemical factory to the production of a year’s worth of liquid fertilizer in a single day or two. The problem with this was that they also had to get the end-users of the fertilizer to pick it up immediately after production as they had no storage capacity for it. Suvorov was a young man living on a collective farm and was ordered by the chairman of the collective farm to collect their entire allocation of fertilizer the next day. That quota turned out to be 100 tanker truckloads and the farm had only one truck. Also, the factory was several hundred kilometers away, precluding even the remotest chance that Suvorov could actually bring back 100 loads of fertilizer in 24 hours.
So what did he do? As he arrived at the factory, Suvorov had no idea how he was going to accomplish his assignnment but he realized that all the other collective farms were going to have the same issue so he decided to see what THEY did. He got in line with the other arriving tankers, waited his turn, and got his initial load. Then he followed other trucks out of the factory grounds. They drove a short distance away to a nearby river and promptly dumped the fertilizer straight into the river, then got back in line for their next load. All day long, he followed the other trucks, getting, then dumping, one load at a time. Finally, at the end of his long day, he took the final load back to the collective farm.
When he got there, he found that no one actually wanted the fertilizer! (I don’t recall now if it was just the wrong time of the year to apply fertilizer or if the fertilizer itself was held in low esteem.) He then applied the entire load to his own small private plot which, in due course, destroyed his entire crop. Only the fact that he was due for his military service kept him from starving that winter because his private plot supplied just about all of the food he needed to survive. (Those private plots were hugely important for keeping Soviet citizens alive since the government system was thoroughly rotten.)
I fully expect the United States to operate the same way if Obama gets re-elected and let’s his commissars – a more appropriate term than czars – really get serious about transforming the nation.
Well said and apt example.
In this case, the central planning group was highly successful and met their requirement. The outcome was of no consequence, for example, ‘jobs saved’ or ‘green jobs created’.
Comes back to performance and requirements measures. This admin has thrown out all measures, performance, requirements and government re-engineering that started under Clinton and enforced under Bush. Science and fact have no reality in this admin, only the ghost image of an outcome.
One just has to wonder if a grant for the Arts was used to fund this.
Actually, no: On the exhibition’s Web site, they list the fund sources, and it was mostly private grants and donations — luckily, the taxpayers didn’t have to fund the exhibit itself:
The only public money in there is from BART, which gets some of its funding from local and state taxes, and the UC Botanical Garden itself, which is a state institution. But that looks to be a small-ish percentage of the overall funding.
I want to buy those surplus tubes and stamp “Romney – Ryan” on them.
Contact Greg (who replied to comment #1 above) — he’s got some in stock.
If this isn’t reason enough to vote against every new tax proposal, there will never be enough reason to do so.
At the very least, remember this every time some “journalist”, “reporter”, “newsman”, (or whatever term you wish to give the leftist media purveyors) calls a politician on the carpet for signing Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge.
“SOL Grotto” is certainly le mot juste. “SOL,” back in the early-mid 20th century, used to be a shorthand way of saying “shit out of luck.”
Never thought about that. SOLyndra was a big middle finger to the taxpayers. Even the tubes are phallic.
The devil gets the last laugh.
Yes, look at the sign in the second photo in the essay: it says, “The SOL Grotto also explores Solyndra’s role as a company S#@t Out of Luck.”
However, I see even that as an attempt by the progressive modern artists to shift blame away from the progressive politicians and corrupt crony socialist-capitalists at Solyndra; by characterizing what happened as being a consequence of “luck” rather than as a predictable result of central planning and Democratic mutual-bribery and theft of taxpayer funds, they are trying to downplay the significance of the Solyndra collapse.
I missed that line in the sign. Reminder to self: always read everything before posting.
The sell-off of Solyndra materials also reminds me of those old recordings of tobacco auctions: “SOLd American.”
Your wish is my command:
SOLd American! (original TV commercial)
FWIW, that sign is 100% vaca poopoo when they talk about the “venturi effect”. The venturi effect has nothing to do with what they’re talking about (which is natural convection). A venturi is hourglass-shaped. Things that use the venturi effect are nuke plant cooling towers and carburetors. They necessarily are skinny in the middle.
I wish people would avoid using terms they don’t understand.
But don’t you understand? It sounds cool. That’s all the hipsters need to know.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, but this would make a hipster mess his pants:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
Most people, if they think about it at all, will think that it’s a reference to the architect Robert Venturi.
The rest will simply say, as Sheriff Peter B. Hartman in The Front Page does when he justifies handing the condemned man his own pistol, with which the prisoner shoots his way out, “I thought it was for somethin’ scientific!”
Or maybe Ludwig wrote it.
I remember arguing with someone about this when Solyndra collapsed and they said, “Don’t worry, all that research and supplies will be put to use.” They thought that all the knowledge of the workers would be retained (as if they had mental copies of the contents of their hard drives) and that someone would swoop in a buy all the equipment and supplies. I wish I could remember which idiot I was arguing with, because this would be great to show them how wrong they were. Sigh.
Sometimes, being right isn’t just unsatisfying (since I can’t gloat) but also distressing because of the $535 million wasted. If they’d just given each of the 1,000 employees whose jobs were “created” by this investment $535,000 each to start some business, we’d at least have ended up with a few operating burrito trucks.
Remember, kids: Every time you hear of a stimulus disater story, that’s just the money that can be accounted for! Much of it went God-knows-where and to fictitious zip codes!
We was robbed!
Every time you hear a Stimulus disaster story, a community organizer gets his wings. Or at least his offshore account.
Okay; I’ve read enough.
They could be used for catheters for hippopotamus and elephants that have a urinary infection, or need ovary exams.
And, homos in Frisco.
GOOD EFF’N GOD;
I’ve had turds that were more artistic.
I’m going to attach photos for proof.
BEWARE OF THE TURD THAT ATE LOS ANGELES!
someone should do an exhibit titled “the tubes of choom”
Nice, very clever!
This is art? Looks like the chandeliers in half the hotel ballrooms where I’ve attended conferences over the years. Oh, wait. These are *sideways*. Now I get it.
I suggest using them to make a giant Obama “O” symbol. Hope and Change. Perhaps right next to the Obama library.
BRAVO!, Zombie, for a good investigative article on Obama’s campaign of waste, fraud and abuse of tax payers.
I want my money back.
And there are people(?) in this country that want 4 more years of this? Whatever were they thinking 4 years ago…. or is “thinking” a far too generous term?
This seems to be a question NO ONE has asked but is there a Solyndra installation on a real commercial site anywhere producing power? Anywhere? Anywhere? Bueller?
I’m no WREK of an engineer but I’m seeing some notable things in this, my first real intimate look at Solyndra’s actual product line. First off, whatever inefficiencies the design may mitigate it has one glaring flaw… YOU CAN SEE THROUGH IT! In other words it is CLEARLY not drawing any juice from some 50% of the sunlight that strikes the installation’s footprint. How does that compute? I smell fudgery on the sq footage performance specs.
Now this “glass tube” innovation seems curious as I recall Popular Mechanics displaying this set-up as the wave of the future back around 1979. Maybe it is like everything they went through to land that latest robot on Mars when we had Viking there 35 years ago.
Finally, I remember that one of the real problems with glass installations was, surprisingly, their fragility. I had assumed that Solyndra brand solar tube arrays were made of something more exotic and durable. Hmm. Out of the money once again. But again, has this produced a single cento-watt hour of power that ever made a slice of toast?
In the essay above I link to this article: Solyndra: Its technology and why it failed. They point out the same flaw that you do:
The bizarre design decision to leave huge gaps in the Solyndra panels was supposedly so that the panels wouldn’t ever catch the wind like a sail, and thus didn’t need to be as strongly bolted down as regular panels; to make up for missing out on half the photons, the user could put a mirror under the panel and catch the rays as they bounced back up, since the tubes were photovoltaic on the underside as well.
Even so, with all that, the total performance improvement of Solyndra panels over standard-issue regular panels was just 7% more electricity produced. To get that extra performance, they cost at least 400% as much as their competitors.
You do the math. Who would pay 400% the market rate to get 107% the value? In the real world — no one. Hence: predictable bankruptcy. (Predictable to everyone except Obama and Chu, apparently.)
How much of the money went into the guy’s pockets who scammed the little colored boy out of millions of dollars?
Get our crackerjack Atty. Gen’l on the case.
Are you sitting down? Our ‘crackerjack AG’ could be a ‘crackerjack Supreme Court Justice’ if Obama is re-elected.
We could cut them up and make millions of “AccuJack” erectile dysfunction vacuum devices.
The Curse of Solyndra
There is nothing like a presidential gift to a friend….er…
There is nothing like an intentional international market manipulation and collapse of competitors….er…..
There is nothing like a hail storm or an errant tree branch.
Solyndra is the Flagship dead end example of bad political greed agenda-driven science ignoring reality, measurable outcome and impact.
42 other ‘ventures’ lay in dust around the US. Yet, two weeks ago We just threw another tens of billions to a subset of political investment failures.
So the name of the exhibit refers to the fact that we taxpayers are now s_ out of luck?
Actually, according to the sign in the second photo, it refers to the fact that Solyndra was S–t Out of Luck.
As I said earlier, “However, I see even that as an attempt by the progressive modern artists to shift blame away from the progressive politicians and corrupt crony socialist-capitalists at Solyndra; by characterizing what happened as being a consequence of “luck” rather than as a predictable result of central planning and Democratic mutual-bribery and theft of taxpayer funds, they are trying to downplay the significance of the Solyndra collapse.”
But you’re right — it’s more appropriately descriptive of taxpayers.
If anyone has cable (I don’t) and can watch Fox News, supposedly this post will be mentioned today at 2pm PST /5pm EST (“The Five”) and 3pm PST /6pm EST (“Special Report with Brett Baier”), and the photos/video will be shown.
I don’t watch TV, so tell me how it went!
Excuse me but a;; this talk about “glass tubes” and a solar company what in the hell was the purpose of these things? Were they somehow supposed to harness solar energy and turn it into something else like energy that would keep you warm or cool when needed.
Anyone could produce glass tubes without taxpayer money and probably make a profit at it? These clowns called their endeavor a solar energy project and lost billions of dollars to make glass, one of the oldest technologies of mankind, it seems to me to be a mighty shitty way of ripping off the taxpayer which Obama was more than happy to go along with.
To add insult to injury the actual products that they produced ended up being an art display, kinda like one you might see on my refrigerator by my toddlers or a display of some sort in New York City with vile and despicable renditions of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary or even Joseph of Arimethia.
All this money wasted on glass tubes and for what? Nothing at all. This should have been called Bruster’s anti millions or in this case billions!
Solyndra didn’t manufacture the glass — they bought it at outrageously high prices from a glass foundry in Germany.
Solyndra used the tubes to make cylindrical solar panels — hence their name, Sol(ar) (Cyli)nders.
They actually ordered two different sizes — one slightly slenderer than the other. The were coated on the inside with photovoltaic material, and then inserted into each other to protect and seal the material into place. The theory was that a curved surface could catch more of the sun’s rays at dawn and dusk, but in practice there was only a 7% increase in efficiency, despite costing somewhere between four times and seven times as much as traditional panels.
The issue is that Solyndra was not likely to be a viable money-making company, but the Feds gambled half a billion of our dollars on them for political reasons.
In other words, they had a patent for something that was:
1. An obvious and minor improvement on an existing technology. (In other words, no patent should have been issued.)
2. Way down under the cost/benefit curve, so, never going to be profitable.
And for this we loaned a half billion?
No, for crony connections (READ: Campaign donations) “we” loaned a half billion.
This fairly decent idea just came upon me as to what to do with the glass tubes. Let,s cap one end of the glass tube and make it a vessel for potent potables. Open a bar where one can clink the worlds tallest glasses of beer, wine and all the spirits one can handle in ones glass tube. We,ll call the spot Solyndra cause your guaranteed to slur the word Solyndra (I figure every good drunkard slurs the word Solyndra when they get real blotto ) after you empty your beverage of choice from your glass tube. *Hiccup*
Just as the classic cocktail known as the “Zombie” (no relation) traditionally came in a tall thin glass, we could concoct a new cocktail called “The Solyndra” which would come in an even taller thinner glass.
Suggestions as to the ingredients? Mixologists weigh in!
My suggestion:
The Solyndra
1/2 oz absinthe (to forget how much money you lost)
1 oz orange juice (to remind you of sunshine)
a dash of Tabasco Sauce (like a jolt of electricity in your mouth)
1 oz whiskey (the favorite drink of John Fremont, the pioneer after whom the city of Fremont was named)
1 oz baijiu (traditional Chinese distilled liquor) (as a reminder of the Chinese panels that undercut the price of the cylindrical tube panels)
1 oz pineapple juice (to commemorate Obama’s home state, Hawaii)
3 oz dark rum (because dammit, you just want to get drunk and forget about the whole thing)
a dash of Angostura bitters (to remind you of the bitter aftertaste the scandal gave the nation)
Serve in a two-foot-tall extremely thin tube.
PJM, a while back I sent you guys a link to this stuff being auctioned to Mexico
Why didn’t you run it down and report on it?
Sorry, I never heard about that angle. Could you post the link here?
This post has reached the halls of Congress:
United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee: PRESS RELEASE: Taxpayers Paid for That: The New #1? UC Berkeley’s Solyndra Artwork Would Shatter Record for World’s Most Expensive Piece
It’s nice whenever another blogger links to one’s post; but what if that other blogger is a Congressional committee? Does that count as “going viral,” it is it just embarrassing?
Aw Shucks. Such modesty.
Never mind, Zombie, we all know you are awesome.
O/T: if you have any juice with PJM, could you lobby for a comments notification feature like Huffpo? It’s really a pain to have to return to a thread to see if anyone has responded. No doubt expensive, but it helps the cause: community building. I’ve actually been able to form a small conservative group here in Bali( were most expats are moonbats) this way fomr getting together with right wing Huffpo trolls.
Whether we are down with solar or not, can we agree that Mr. Smestead is a stand up guy?
And while solar isn’t likely to power the nation it has its place and will be of great benefit to isolated folks far from the grid, around the world. Greg works to this and good for him.
Hear hear!
Yep, solar power us a very useful niche technology.
Maybe someday it will be more, but that will require some fundamental breakthroughs, not tinkering with a few percentage points of efficiency.
One niche, now obvious, is to light a dark little shanty located in Berkley.
Frank Lloyd Wright, as usual, got there first:
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Johnson_Wax_Building.html
Hitler would approve.
Zombie, I wonder how long it will take for somebody to take a hammer to the installation and make it an even more distilled, perfect image of Solyndra’s glory. I remember a chihully exhibit in Chicago area not too long ago, and a giant glass art object was shattered, and that was in an inside, watched museum. An outdoor art object needs to be a bit robust and not such an obvious attractive nuisance if it is going to survive.
Dear Smallish Bees, I don’t want to be stung here, but let me go out on a limb and tell everyone that I hope no one damages the SOL Grotto exhibit at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. It would not be in anyone’s best interest and I think it goes against the kind of things that I think Zombie tries to do with his/her articles. I’ve talked to both the artist/architect and Paul Licht, Director at the UC Botanical Garden, and they say they didn’t fully realize how controversial the installation would be until after it was there. Zombie also describes where the funding for it came from, in a comment above. I think it serves as an important reminder of how the [peer-review] process went wrong for the DOE Loan Guarantee given to Solyndra and for the funding that went to it from VCs and the private sector. If someone damages the installation, it may be taken out and people will forget. I think it’s important that people REMEMBER. Anyway, it’s only going to be there until around January. That’s when the Natural Discourse exhibit will end. I went out to see the exhibit recently and, like PJ Media and Zombie, it seems to get people thinking. That’s a good thing. I donated a dozen of my Lucky Bamboo tubes to the gift shop and they are selling them to raise funds to help with all the things that they are doing. While there, I ran into an elderly gentleman, going uphill with a walker, who taking a class there. Keeping the garden safe and free of violence, and politics, for people like him is very important. Go out and spend a few hours at the exhibit and watch how people react to it. I’d also like to thank stonefreetorant and Mark v for their kind words and support. It’s been an uphill battle for me as well, and I am among a few people who have studied solar energy science and solar energy systems all their lives. There’s good news that, like the Lucky Bamboo, comes out of the Solyndra story. According to the SEIA, the U.S. Market Installed 772 MW in Q2 2012; More than Doubling Q2 2011 Market Size
http://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-industry-data
The “Media is Missing The Big Picture On Solar” – The SEIA announced this week that the U.S. is on track to install as much photovoltaic solar power this year as we did in the last decade (Media Matters).
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/09/11/media-missing-the-big-picture-on-solar/189835
I’d also like to give some info. to megapotamus and Steve DeMarcus (regarding their comments above). Pacific Solar Energy installed these Solyndra systems in the Bay Area – Pleasanton Police Department, O’Brien’s Markets, Frito Lay http://www.pacsolarenergy.com/
There are also Solyndra PV installations in Germany and world-wide.
The point discussed in some of the comments above is that they are just not as efficient or cost-effective as other solar technologies. I am writing up an article about this. Lastly, you should all know that China is having its own problems with solar (WSJ “China’s Solyndra Economy”)- http://www.businessinsider.com/wsj-chinas-solyndra-economy-2012-9
Let the SOL Grotto installation and my Lucky Bamboo tubes remind people of all this and more. Please see my web site (above) for more.
Thank you for clarifying so many matters, Greg.
For the record: I also condemn any suggestion of damaging the tubes as some sort of sarcastic “performance art”; I realize that the commenters were joking (as was Greg Gutfeld, who laughed about suggesting the same thing on his TV show when discussing this article), but I just wouldn’t anyone to take the jokes seriously. If you respect private property, then respect the art exhibit. Note also, as pointed out above, that the installation was almost entirely privately funded through donations.
Only a government official could come up with a lie as creative as “cheap imports from China, the collapse of the European market for solar panels and other economic changes doomed the California firm”. My company, Intellimetals, has brokered thousands of pounds of the stainless steel plate left over from this juvenile attempt at business by the Obama administration. The stories of the endless arrogance and boundless ineptitude of the Solyndra miss-management team are still grist for the chatter mill in every company that did business with these people. If they were honest, they would simply admit that this was a “Chicago handshake” to an Obama backer that had no chance of success from the outset. The plate that I brokered cost the taxpayers two dollars and seventy five cents per pound! A private company working without taxpayer money in an entrepreneurial effort would have done the job at a quarter of that. The list of aggressively incompetent decisions surrounding the entire Solyndra project is a study in why government bureaucrats should never be allowed to do business with our money. Glass tubes and so called “art” notwithstanding, SOL is a perfect description of the taxpayer when the government enters the marketplace.
Sorry for any misunderstanding. I was in no way suggesting that a reader SHOULD do damage to the installation. I was observing that this unusual employment of the rods seems destined to be vandalixzed, just by nature of materials and venue. Unless it is under constant watch, how many years can it stand?
Those unused tubes can be used in glass art museums. If it is really clean then it can be used for coloured glass splashbacks as well. They should do something about it because they spent a lot of money for those glass tubes.