Green Energy Fails

You may recall a couple years ago that I showed you, dear readers, how to become filthy rich off of scamming people who believe in the Global Warming/Climate Change crapfest. As is the case with many of my schemes & plots, this was done tongue in cheek and drenched in snarky sarcasm. 

Sadly, though, there really was an awful lot of filthy luchre to be had by scamming the Obama Crowd and gobbling up money from the Succubus Package in phony “green” energy voodoo. They were handing out money….TAXPAYER money, pell-mell to all & sundry who claimed to be green. Billions were wasted, and I do mean literally wasted and pissed away, on companies, some of them not even American companies, who in many cases ended up BANKRUPT.

Financial woes and failures have been widespread, with vast amounts of cronyism and corruption and graft. The fact that some green energy companies are not under financial duress does not make the Feral Gubmint’s forays into venture capitalism a success. It simply means that our taxpayer dollars subsidized companies that should’ve found the financial support in the private market. However, few in the private market were willing to piss away billions for trains and windmills.

So far, at least 34 companies that were offered federal support from taxpayers are faltering — either having already gone bankrupt or heading for it and. laying off workers to stave off the inevitable. The following list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy and other agencies. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but rather 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.

Prepare to choke back your own bile.

Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*

SpectraWatt ($500,000)*

Solyndra ($535 million)*

Beacon Power ($43 million)*

Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)

SunPower ($1.2 billion)

First Solar ($1.46 billion)

Babcock and Brown ($178 million)

EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*

Amonix ($5.9 million)

Fisker Automotive ($529 million)

Abound Solar ($400 million)*

A123 Systems ($279 million)*

Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*

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 ($6.5 million)*

Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*

Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*

GreenVolts ($500,000)

Vestas ($50 million)

LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)

Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*

Navistar ($39 million)

Satcon ($3 million)*

Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*

Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)

*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy. 

The National Renewable Energy Lab also received $200 million in stimulus funding, but it is a government laboratory, not a private firm.

This used to be a $100,000 Fisker electric speedster. It caught fire like a Chevy Volt. When you're a rich liberal, you burn cars to stay warm...

The 2009 Succubus Package set aside $80 billion to subsidize politically preferred energy projects. Since that time, 1,900 investigations have been opened to look into stimulus waste, fraud, and abuse (although not all are linked to the green-energy funds), and nearly 600 convictions have been made. Of that $80 billion in clean energy loans, grants, and tax credits, at least 10 percent has gone to companies that have since either gone bankrupt or are circling the drain.

Bear in mind, the Obama Administration has virtually shut down offshore oil drilling in US waters, while applauding Brazil doing it and telling them we’d be their biggest customers. In fact, we paid for them to do it, lending the Brazilians over 2 BILLION dollars to go drill their oil and then sell it to us. Some of that loan money paid for US drilling rigs to leave the Gulf of Mexico for Brazil rather than sit idle.

The same Administration said no to the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada, costing us a readily available oil supply and thousands of jobs. Canada will instead sell their oil to…who else? CHINA.

The same administration said it intended to bankrupt the coal industry and that your electricity costs would necessarily skyrocket. Gasoline costs twice what it did when Obama took office.

The same administration used billions in taxpayer funds to prop up Chrysler so that it could be sold to a foreign company, Fiat, after another foreign company, Daimler, bailed out and ran. Billions and billions more were used to prop up General Motors as they tout the miserable sales of the Chevy Volt, a car so expensive that the average median income of a Volt buyer is $170,000 per year, according to General Motors CEO Dan Akerson. That high income puts the Volt’s buyers in the top 7 percent of households, according to census data, and slightly above the rankings held by households with BMWs, Lexuses or Cadillacs.The average income of BMW buyers is nearly $170,000, according to a May 2010 article in Bloomberg Business Week. Cadillac buyers earn almost $130,000, and Lexus buyers take home an average of $141,000. Only Mercedes-Benz drivers earn more than Volt drivers, an average of $174,000 per year.

Ironic that rich liberals are the only buyers…but it’s okay to be rich if you’re a Leftist.

And to add insult to injury, the Feds already give you a $7500 tax rebate to buy a Volt, and are trying to increase it to $10,000. That mammoth subsidy would cost taxpayers $100 million each year if it is approved by Congress, presuming only 10,000 new-technology autos like the Volt or the Nissan Leaf are sold each year. But the administration wants to get 1 million new-tech autos on the road by 2015. The subsidy cost of that goal could reach $10 billion.

Where the hell is that money going to come from? Oh yeah…you & me.

Hope…Change….Fail…..you have two weeks to make up your minds, America. Recovery, or Hell in a Handbasket.