These are my notes from September of 2011.
I saw on C-Span a House Hearing on SOLYNDRA. I was fascinated by the hateful ignorance of the Republicans on the committee.
The Department of Energy representative talking to Committee, from the Department of Energy, run by the Nobel Prize winning Steven Chu from Stanford University, came from the venture capital world. The venture world had invested more than $1Billion in SOLYNDRA. It was not a Government Boondoggle!
He answered each question precisely, http://bit.ly/oqZiI9 and then the strange thing happened: he was angrily asked the identical political, never technical, question a dozen more times by a different Republican. They all had the same instructions. Try to Gotcha Obama!
The reasons Solyndra was supported by the Obama Administration: the Bush Rare Earth (RE) Disaster! Because, the “China-Sells-it-Cheaper-Syndrome” let the US Government allow closing one of the then largest producer of Rare Earth Metals in the world in 2002 in California, leaving over 90% of Rare earth production in the hand of the Chinese. The Mountain Pass Mine at the border to Nevada is a world class deposit of RE Oxides, with an abundance between 8 and 12% of RE Oxides. The closure was a first grade National Security disaster http://nyti.ms/nljKGV. Prices went through the roof.
Here is the world we live in in 2011:
fact 1: China subsidizes photovoltaics with $30Billion/year
fact 2: the 50:5 of US:China ratio of panel production a few year ago has now gone to 5:50
fact 3: the Solyndra technology has lower installation costs, something you cannot off-shore
fact 4: Solyndra had 1$Billion of private equity money
fact 5: the cost of solar panels drops 20% with each doubling of production http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4623
fact 6: Republicans on the Committee were aware and showed the falloff of costs with production in a power point display.
The Chinese playbook then would have subsidized, for example, a 10-fold increase of production, which would have dropped the prize 89%. Can’t do, Republican ideology says: this is picking winners, “China-sells-it-cheaper”. So the Republican House browbeat DoE 2001 into doing nothing!
My summary: DoE didn’t make a mistake with Solyndra except for not increasing the subsidy (= the production).
Note added in proof in July of 2018
If the Chinese would have owned Solyndra they would have subsidized a 10-fold increase of production, which at a doubling rate of 1.25 would have dropped the prize by 89%. Repeat: DoE didn’t make a mistake, except for not financing an increase in production. But which it could not: it would mean to pick winners, and so it was verboten by politically correct Republicans.
Consider this: the low installation cost SOLYNDRA products had a chance to keep green jobs here, using the reverse Moore Law, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4623 which says cost drop when quantity rises. The Chinese would have given a factory money until they could produce enough at low prices to be competitive. US Government used to do this with airplanes, hiding behind the military.
Instead of letting Solyndra go bankrupt, it should have been converted into a National Solar Cell Development Laboratory. There was over a $Billion of equipment investment in Fremont. It was sold for pennies on the dollar. So finally Republicans in Congress found a $500Million green green energy project, out of $50Billion, by Obama (and Steve Chu) which did not work out and could be criticized. .
There is an excellent DoE Handbook about costing http://bit.ly/os2gTT, Chapter 21 deals with learning curves in hi-tech production. But in the end the career engineers in DoE were afraid of the Republicans accusing them of throwing good money after bad, or some political trickery.
DoE methodology has been used by cutting edge places like CERN using the falling cost of doubling production. For the numerically challenged, if you ramp up production of solar panels by a factor of 8, the cost drops by a factor of 2.4 to 42% of the original.
Thanks to CERN I am, among other things, a world expert in the effect of doubling production rates on price https://stanford.io/2JwMpex . This study I made for the European Research Center CERN in 2000 while on sabbatical from Stanford, to my surprise was the only serious quantitative engineering publication which came up in a Google query on “Cost effects of doubling High Tech Production”.
Can't do that with green energy GOP says, this is not only “picking” winners, it is “making” winners. China sells it cheaper! Republicans allow subsidies in the National Security Interest only with oil and nuclear reactors!
As to the California Rare Earth Mine Mountain Pass: it is now owned by a Chinese Conglomerate.
Comment added in proof in June 2021
I asked my Mainland Chinese friends and acquaintances (visiting at Stanford University), with the understanding of confidentiality (because they are scared), what is the probability that "koNko" is a Chinese Government paid scientific peon.
The answer was unanimous: 100% probability. It is part of the Goebbels-like propaganda machine. The PRC wants to keep the empowering Rare Earth Monopoly. The friends added: one cursory look at your polymath credentials, by googling “Rainer_Pitthan”, tells us that "koNko"s self-congratulatory bile is non-sense.