(12-04-2016 09:18 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(12-04-2016 08:36 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Solyndra got $500 million in government loans and employed a maximum of 1100 people. Where did the money--both government loan and private equity--go?

Well, a quick Google search sent me to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

With a really minimal amount of research I found that the loan was used to help fund a $733 million fabrication facility which was expected to produce 610 megawatts of solar panels by 2013 (should things have gone as planned).

Turns out, what doomed Solyndra was a drop in the price of polysilicon from '09-'11 which was the key ingredient in competing technologies, which meant that Solyndra was unable to compete with the new prices. So despite Solyndra having a novel approach to the solar problem (using tubes to collect energy), the free market killed them when raw material prices changed (very similar to what we're seeing with the O&G sector right now).

Now, some of the loan went to some pretty extravagant expenditures at the plant (including spa showers), but I imagine that the vast majority of the $733 million spent on the facility went to things like production robotics.

Spa showers aren't a good description. And the descriptions of the other "extravagances" that I have seen have been dodgy ones at best. But that is the fun with reporting with political agendas.....

For example with the "spa showers", the issue is that that showers had digital controls associated with them. The long and short is that in the building process, you spend x dollars for showers that broadly define hot, warm, and cold. You spend about 1.35 x for digital fine control. No more than 7k was spent on this.

Tort law requires that when you are working with bad chemicals that require specific temperatures for flushing, that a fab that has these chemicals cannot justify spending the lesser amount at the expense of worker safety.

The fab cost involved not just "the fab", but all aspects from the ground up" purchasing the plot, design, construction, and outfitting with highly unique machinery. Solyndra not only had highly unusual approach in the tubes, but developing a process for those surfaces was the first time it was done. And the tubes were 4.2 feet long. And the material was a material that had never been made in commercial quantities before.

All in all it was a *****.

And the final cost of Fab 2 was closer to 780 million from finding the parcel to panels rolling out.