November 26, 2018
A multi-year effort by federal, state, and local agencies to prop up an Oregon solar-panel manufacturer has ended in a shuttered factory, millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain, and a heavily polluted manufacturing site.
A multi-year effort by federal, state, and local agencies to prop up an Oregon solar-panel manufacturer has ended in a shuttered factory, millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain, and a heavily polluted manufacturing site.
In 2010 SoloPower Systems (SoloPower) claimed it could manufacture “flexible” solar PV cells and modules that were light and thin enough to be installed on buildings that couldn’t support regular solar panels. Promising to employ hundreds of people at its 225,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, SoloPower attracted millions of dollars in loans and tax credits from government agencies.
Governments Provide Funding
In 2010 the U.S. Department of Energy loaned SoloPower $10 million. Business Oregon, a state agency, granted SoloPower $20 million in tax credits. The City of Portland agreed to cover half of SoloPower’s debt to the state, provided the solar-panel factory was located within the city’s limits, while Multnomah County, where Portland is located, declared the company’s factory site was in an enterprise zone, freeing the company from paying property taxes as long as it met certain job creation requirements.
By August 2011, the Obama administration increased is commitment to the project, furnishing $197 million in DOE loan guarantees to the company, and the California Energy Commission loaned the company nearly $5 million.
Company Falters
SoloPower’s prospects yielded relatively quickly to marketplace realities with the company’s largely untested technologies proving unreliable and more expensive than those offered by its competitors.
In April 2013, the company shut down its factory and laid off most of its workforce. By July 2013 it stopped making payments on its state loans and shortly thereafter, California sued the company for failing to make payments on its loan.
Subsequently, the U.S. Energy Department withdrew its $197 million in loan guarantees, and in the fall of 2017, the Trump Energy Department declared SoloPower in default of its original $10 million loan.
Also in 2017, Multnomah County sued the company for $1.8 million in back property taxes the county says the company owes for failing to meet the job commitments necessary to qualify for the property tax breaks it received, and SoloPower ceased making to the state of Oregon, saddling Portland with repaying the company’s entire $5 million loan guarantee from the state.
Toxic Waste Site
In an audit of the company Oregon’s Secretary of State pointed out although “Multnomah County had the legal right to seize the borrower’s equipment for delinquent taxes,” it was unlikely to do so because the plant was heavily polluted with cadmium and hydrochloric acid.
Seizing the equipment may not be an option given the level of pollution at the plant.
This stuff is very caustic,” Michael Vaughn, Multnomah County accessor told Oregon Live. “And there’s lots of it. It’s one big mess.”
Cleaning up the plant is estimated to cost more than $500,000.
Read the rest of the story here.
HT/Marcus
$500,000 to clean a toxic waste site? Methinks there are zeroes missing from the end of this number. It will either sit there as a monument to toxic waste, or the taxpayers will get hosed. Well, the hosed taxpayers part is inevitable, no matter the outcome.
Thank heavens for https://wattsupwiththat.com ! Now ordinary people who actually think for themselves, or those who have been taught WHAT TO THINK can start undoing their brain-washing.
When you see every strongly motivated efforts to stop all discussion about AGW and the fraud around CO2, you just know that free thinking and an open web will undo the best efforts of the Marxist green movement. You see Greenpeace acting as the international funds gathering organization on the basis of saving the whales ( the oil industry already saved the whales when they invented oil drilling and refining, stopping whales from being butchered for lighting oil. ), or saving some or other insect or worm, and of course saving the plant! Their employees enjoy the best travel and perks. As Greenpeace is treated as a charitable organization in many countries, they pay no taxes. All that money gets funneled into supporting international “save the planet” jaunts, and supporting their activists who slither into true environmental groups, slowly turning the environmentalists into Marxist activist cells which move into politics, starting at local government levels, and then into mainstream politics. The true environmental parties no longer have independent control, they have been eaten up from the inside.
Left-wing groups, socialists, openly Marxist proponents and their colleagues in mainstream media, give plenty of biased reporting whilst denigrating anyone who dares to question or raise points not liked by the AGW brigade.
Real scientists, wary of being tagged as “deniers” ( typical Marxist branding of non-group thinkers) and denied funding for research grants, have to bite their tongues and keep a low profile. This is nothing short of intimidation, tactics used by thugs and Stasi like bureaucrats, all being paid and funded by taxpayers. The system structure could not be more vicious!
Politicians, not being interested in getting to the bottom of scams, gayly hand out taxpayers money so they can say ” I’m doing my part to save the world “, and are easily scared by the pseudo-scientists, and are not willing to challenge or debate the “groupthink” lest they get pilloried by the mainstream media!
So when we can all read and discuss issues properly on sites like wattsupwiththat, there is always hope that this scam will get undone in due course.
Wow… it’s almost like fairy dust isn’t a real natural resource…