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applegrove

(118,684 posts) Fri Nov 14, 2014, 12:02 AM Nov 2014

'Scandalous' Solyndra Program Actually Earned Taxpayers a $5 Billion Profit

'Scandalous' Solyndra Program Actually Earned Taxpayers a $5 Billion Profit

by Jeff Spross at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/13/3592107/doe-loan-program-profit/

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The much-maligned government program that funded the failed solar tech company Solyndra is expected to make taxpayers a $5 to $6 billion return, Bloomberg Businessweek reported on Wednesday.

The loan program is run out of the Department of Energy (DOE), and covers a large umbrella of investments to encourage green energy and low-carbon technologies. According to Businessweek, the expected positive returns on those investments are detailed in a new report DOE will be releasing, perhaps as early as Thursday, on the loan program’s performance — the first such estimate the agency has made of the fruits of its efforts.

The program has the authority to spend as much as $40 billion, and has allocated $32.4 billion of that to a portfolio with dozens of specific projects. Half of the $32.4 billion has already been paid out, in loans that average a 22-year lifecycle. The Energy Department expects the full $5 to $6 billion return to come in over that total time period. But $3.5 billion of the principal for those loans has already been paid back by the various companies that received them, and the government has already garnered over $810 million in interest payments. The portfolio’s losses only amount to $780 million so far, and they aren’t expected to rise above $2 billion once everything is said and done — a fraction of the $10 billion in losses the government anticipated when it originally designed the program.

This stands in stark contrast to the image critics painted of the program. In 2011, the solar tech company Solyndra collapsed after receiving $528 million from the program, setting off a political feeding frenzy and embarrassing the White House.

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