Solyndra couldn't survive without customers.
GM and Honda calling it quits...
- Thread starter UncleDave
- Start date
Precisely. Most venture capital investors would have spotted those risks. No repercussions for losing taxpayer money.
Quite laughable how Legislators who legally participate in insider trading, make laws for my industry regarding Fiduciary business practices (which I fully support), while wasting/gaining personally from not being Fiduciaries of our tax dollars.
Solyndra was privately funded. They had over a billion dollars in private equity funding. The half a billion from the federal government was in loan guarantees that they used to expand production.
Granted the approval of the loan was probably not a good idea given that the business model was gone as Jeff noted. Another issue was that natural gas was cheap and then made for cheap electric generation.
Also - the solar loan guarantee program overall made money for the federal government. The program was able to handle a few bad loan guarantees.
Thanks, should have refreshed my memory. I stayed away from that based on the information I had for myself and clients. Thanks for the info.
They had over a billion dollars in private funding before the federal loan guarantee. A lot of those companies lost money, but they got in before the federal loan guarantee and at a time before Chinese manufacturers started a price war. I've been involved in a few startup companies, and there are always risks based on speculation of the market.
Granted I could never figure out what their advantage was with those cylindrical cells. I thought the light coming in at variable angles (on a cylindrical cell) wasn't as good and they needed space in order to catch reflections that would be better spent with tighter spacing of flat cells.
Solyndra was classic. Privatitize the profits and when that fails, socialize the costs.
The benefit was the need for less polysilicon which was very expensive; when the price significantly dropped, their tech advantage immediately followed. It was over.
Interestingly, Tesla now occupies the 2 Solyndra buildings. I worked across the street at Lam.
I did hear about their materials being different, but the shape of the cells just seemed bizarre and pointless. I'm thinking whoever did the math about the how the shape captured sunlight didn't win out over the "But it looks cool" faction.
And I'll occasionally drive by the main building, which is Seagate now.
It is still early in the technology. If done right they should be fixable or patchable.
Think greasable ball joints, or unibody, or aluminum head not tolerant to overheating. People used to call that a potential problem. They are not the big deal they used to be now.
Imagine being able to mill off a portion of casting and then helicoil another piece in there, like how wood can be joint together with dovetail. With a correctly designed CNC machine it is possible.
Or those camber kit people use after collision and to modify their car after lowering. Something like that can be designed for gigacast as well.
I know a friend in the solar business. He was on the equipment side for company making solar panels. Basically this is the law and subsidies not catching up to the tech and economy fast enough. Nobody expect silicon based solar panel to drop price so fast, rendering solyndra's technology obsolete and bankrupted. Nobody also anticipate roof top solar penetration happened so fast that we ended up with duck curve, so we ended up with the original NEM that pays retail but now has to stop asap before bankrupting everyone else and problem in the grid.
China really commoditized solar. You can hate them all you want but this will eventually happen when low interest rate is flooding into R&D because traditional investment are all overpriced and the money need to find an outlet to invest, hence the need to create new stuff. If China didn't do it someone else would.
The view from Japan.
Well, my point this morning is Toyota reported sales gains in every part of the world yesterday and over a 40% (FORTY PERCENT) increase in profits.
Oh... how that company was portrayed as out of touch and behind on EVs.
Lets see, profits doubled in the last quarter, increased it year over year profit forecast to be up 50% by March 2024.
THIS IS HUGE
Wait, but dont they read and watch what the mass media reports? *LOL* *LOL*
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This is underscored by the fact that Toyota still has waiting lists for their hybrid models (so do the other manufacturers who are selling hybrids), over 1 year for some models. If Toyota manufactured more of them, they would sell more of them, and their sales and profits would be even higher.
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
And done amongst borderline price dumping by Korea - who as a country are not your standard Toyota fans …
Yes, but the "profit" the federal government made came from state and local utilities, all of whose profit comes from taxpayers paying monopolized utility rates.
Not really much of a comfort that the Feds didn't lose your money because someone else took it instead.
And yet….
The magical compute models can’t actually forecast pinpoint weather 6-10 days ahead of time,.. At best those models get the long wave jetstream pattern right 80-85 percent of the time in that time frame. And that is no where near remotely close to predicting exact weather conditions in a certain location.
Nor can they remotely accurately predict hurricane rapid intensification… like Hurricane Otis, and many other storms in the past 20 years.
So… I highly, highly don’t trust them to somehow accurately predict the climate 15-50 years out ahead in time.
And those models are only as good as the data… and the people inputting that data into them.
This isn’t currently or foreseeably economically feasible.
Go to Google an enter in "oil from algae"
Algae makes its own oil. It's a wealth of energy.
"The biofuel’s poor performance is due to its manufacturing process, which requires more energy than the final product can produce."
https://hakaimagazine.com/news/biofuel-made-from-algae-isnt-the-holy-grail-we-expected/
That's as of now apparently. That does not mean that it wouldn't improve with tech and using renewable tech to power the process of making the butanol. I still think developing of tech to burn fuel is a bit of a lost cause. Emissions will continue to crush this method of propulsion and even electricity production keeps getting more stringent regulations. It's why we see so many alternative sources as it is.
