Steve Westly, a venture capitalist, California’s former comptroller, prominent Obama bundler, and one-time gubernatorial candidate for California, appeared on Press Here on Sunday, a weekly Bay Area show on innovation, to defend the administration’s clean energy program.
It’s worth listening to Westly not only because he’s a major investor in clean energy technologies, but because he’s influential in behind-the-scenes clean energy policymaking, by being on the Department of Energy’s 12-member advisory board.
And because of his extensive fund-raising activities for President Obama, and his company The Westly Group‘s own investments in clean energy companies, he is likely to be much more in the political spotlight in upcoming months as Republicans look to portray Obama’s clean energy policies as payback to people who helped him get elected.
In Sunday morning’s interview, Westly states that “there was a consensus” at the time that the stimulus grants and loan guarantees were given out that clean energy would be “one of the biggest job providers of the future.”
He also said that Energy Secretary Steven Chu hired a lot of people from the private sector to evaluate the more than a thousand grants and loan applications sent in to the department for the funds.
Westly downplayed the significance of Solyndra’s failure, citing electric car company Tesla (one of his firm’s former investments) as an example of a clean-energy stimulus funding success.
One of Tesla’s plants, also based in Fremont, California, employs many of the workers who were laid off when Toyota shut its plant down. It now employs more than a thousand people.
Despite all the concerns and criticism today, the United States is a net exporter of solar, Westly noted.
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