Solar manufacturer Solyndra is in the news for all the wrong reasons these days. Not long after Solyndra filed Chapter 11 and terminated 1,100 workers, the company, which received a $535 million federal loan guarantee from the DOE to building a new facility, got an early-morning visit from FBI agents with search warrants at its Fremont, Calif., headquarters.
This article in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal said, “That loan and ties to President Barack Obama have become embarrassing to the White House, providing critics of its energy policies with ammunition. When Obama toured Solyndra's plant last year, he said, "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra."
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.