Energy Secretary Defends Solyndra Loan

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Source: NYT

The bankruptcy of Solyndra, the solar power company that took $528 million in government loans, was “extremely unfortunate,” the Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told lawmakers on Thursday. But he rejected a suggestion put forward by a Republican that he or his department should apologize.

Companies fail when “the bottom of the market falls out,” Mr. Chu testified before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That, he said, is what happened to the solar panel business, for two reasons that he maintained could not be foreseen.

“This company and several others got caught in a very, very bad tsunami,” he said. New plants to manufacture solar panels started up in China and elsewhere, while the market for the panels was softening because of economic troubles in Europe. Prices dropped 70 percent in two and a half years, he said.

But Republicans pursued the theme that the problem was incompetence and political influence. Clifford Stearns of Florida, chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee, which held the hearing, said, “it is readily apparent that senior officials in the administration put politics before the stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/business/energy-environment/energy-secretary-defends-solyndra-loan.html