Solyndra why bankrupt

Did they misinterpret the data they were seeing? These questions get murkier, thanks to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service CRS , which now says there were several factors that could have served as warning signs ahead of or shortly after the government investment.

Solyndra, says CRS, was planning to drive down its costs by scaling up its operations with the government backing, but there was no guarantee that it would be successful. Clearly, it was not. We support that review, and I look forward to the results. The Energy Department is committed to continually improving and applying lessons learned in everything we do, because the stakes could not be higher for our country. When it comes to the clean energy race, America faces a simple choice: compete or accept defeat.

I believe we can and must compete. Collectively, the projects plan to employ more than 60, Americans, create tens of thousands more indirect jobs, provide clean electricity to power three million homes, and save more than million gallons of gasoline a year, all while investing in American competitiveness.

What matters to the men and women who have those jobs is that the investments that this Administration is making are helping to keep factories open and running. When the Washington Post claims that the program has created 3, jobs, here is what the reporters are excluding:. Others have not ramped fully up to scale. But we are on pace to achieve more than 60, direct jobs — and many more in the supply chain.

It employed workers during construction. Those wind turbines were built in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The project also features a state of the art energy storage system supplied by a company in Texas. The supply chain reached U. The investments are helping to build a new clean energy industry here in America.

We are now on pace to double renewable energy generation from wind and solar from the time the President took office. Yet we are still in danger of falling behind China and other nations that are competing aggressively for leadership in these technologies.

This is a race we can and will win, but only if we make these investments today. One of the goals of the program is to create projects that will encourage the private sector to take the financing risk on other, similar projects on its own.

If we can show, for example, that a commercial scale cellulosic biofuel plant in Iowa can succeed, the private sector will likely finance many more of them around the country. The next great technological revolution is the clean energy revolution, and this Administration is committed to making sure that America will continue to lead the world. The International Energy Agency projects that solar power will grow steadily, producing nearly a quarter of the world's electricity within four decades.

Our competitors know this, and are playing to win. Winning will require substantial investments. Unfortunately, expanding production has coincided with short-term softening demand, a product of the banking crisis in Europe and its wider economic effects.

This has taken a serious toll on solar manufacturers everywhere, including the U. By Tom Hals. President Barack Obama lifts a solar panel as he tours Solyndra, Inc. The solar industry has been in turmoil this year as a glut of panels has sent prices plummeting 25 percent. Tom Pyle, an energy industry expert who led the Trump presidential transition team on energy, says the program's ongoing existence despite the lessons learned from the Solyndra debacle shows that government has no business backing private energy companies, whether they're solar or not.

Attorneys Walter Brown is at left, and Jan. Nielsen Little is at right in this photo. Scott Applewhite, File. And when he considers the prospects of our energy future under proposals like the Green New Deal, Pyle says the lack of knowledge becomes all the more obvious.

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