Some clean-energy firms found U.S. loan-guarantee program a bad bet

[alp227]

Source: The Washington Post

Uwe T. Schmidt, chief executive of Solar Trust, says he is a fan of the Energy Department’s loan-guarantee program. He met with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the program’s director, Jonathan Silver, when his company was seeking support for a 1,000-megawatt solar thermal plant it wanted to build in the California desert in Riverside County.

But when the department offered him a $2.1 billion loan guarantee, Schmidt turned it down. It would have been one of the largest stimulus-funded clean-tech­nol­ogy projects, and Solar Trust had been negotiating the deal for roughly a year. But Schmidt decided it was too risky.

“I’m now famous for getting the largest loan guarantee and then turning it down,” Schmidt said. “For very sound business reasons, we opted not to go forward.”

The Obama administration’s vaunted initiative to catalyze the U.S. clean-energy industry — under attack for betting half a billion dollars on the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra, which closed last month — has become a case study of what can go wrong when a rigid government bureaucracy tries to play venture capitalist and jump-start a nascent, fast-changing market.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/some-clean-energy-firms-found-us-loan-guarantee-program-a-bad-bet/2011/09/13/gIQA9n5J0K_singlePage.html

[elleng]

1. Good idea to look into this.

Reminds me of MDs messing up their medical practices due to lack of business experience.