Solar companies beware. If you borrow lots of federal US money and default, you’ll be searched by the FBI. Solyndra’s case is really an extreme in the industry, yet after others like Evergreen also fell by the wayside, the normal course of events is to look for a “fall guy”. It must be politics, it must be laundering, it must be….nothing more than bad calculations over the direction of an industry and the required cost cutting to stay favorable when you are measured by your watts per square inch cost, and not much else.
Touted as the next generation solar technology, its tubular design was certainly unique. However, the premise might have been an industry which used to pay far more than it does today, thanks in part to China’s doubled up efforts to take costs of out the process, is no longer in play, and Solyndra and others simply banked on a wrong assumption.
They’ll poke around and try to find a fall guy, yet in the end its simply bad management and the risk one takes when banking on the holy grail approach. American companies in the solar power industry are faced with tough choices as the Chinese and Indian solar cell and module producers benefit from massive government support and far lower wages and even resulting raw material costs.
This solar blog writer suspects that there will be more people for the FBI to visit if they really want to, yet I doubt that anyone else will get such an intrusion. After all, half a billion is a lot of DOE DOW…
Sass