Showing posts with label Chapter 11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chapter 11. Show all posts

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Every Green Energy Failure Is News


USA Today (10/17/12) ran a story about a battery manufacturer filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But the story might as well have been a press release from the Mitt Romney campaign.
"Another Blow for Green Energy" read the headline. Wendy Koch's piece led off with this:
An electric vehicle battery maker that was awarded $249 million in federal stimulus funds filed for Chapter 11 reorganization on Tuesday, giving GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney potential ammunition to attack President Obama's green-energy subsidies.
It's a short article, but it's hard to avoid the central theme: This is good news for the Romney campaign. Koch writes:
Its Chapter 11 filing will likely spur further GOP criticism, which escalated once solar panel manufacturer Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 protection in September 2011 after receiving more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees.
In the first presidential debate October 3, Romney called four aid recipients "losers," including Solyndra, Fisker, EV car maker Tesla Motors and auto battery manufacturer Ener1.
"You don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers," Romney told Obama in a sharp exchange.
On Tuesday, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul called A123's bankruptcy "yet another failure for the president's disastrous strategy of gambling away billions of taxpayer dollars on a strategy of government-led growth that simply does not work."
If it's important to note the campaign ramifications of this story, then perhaps readers should know that Romney claimed that about half of the companies receiving green energy loan guarantees have gone out of business. That is, as you might expect, completely false.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Another DOE-Backed Solar Company Goes Bankrupt


A solar company that got a multi-million-dollar grant from the Department of Energy earlier this year announced Wednesday that it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, making it the second taxpayer-backed green energy company to file for bankruptcy this week.
Satcon Technology Corp. announced the decision in a Wednesday news release. “This has been a difficult time for Satcon,” president and CEO Steve Rhoades said. “After careful consideration of available alternatives, the Company’s Board of Directors determined that the Chapter 11 filings were a necessary and prudent step, allowing the Company to continue to operate while giving us the opportunity to reorganize with a stronger balance sheet and capital structure.”
Satcon received a $3 million DOE grant in January to develop “a compact, lightweight power conversion device that is capable of taking utility-scale solar power and outputting it directly into the electric utility grid at distribution voltage levels—eliminating the need for large transformers.”
“If successful,” noted DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) at the time, “Satcon would simplify the solar power conversion process and significantly reduce the cost of operating, installing, and siting a PV power system—helping to facilitate their widespread use.”
ARPA-E also stated that the grant “could create jobs for system installers, technicians, and salespeople.”

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