The White House has had just about enough of the post-bankruptcy bashing of its support for Solyndra and clean energy writ large.
Two weeks after the Freemont, Ca. solar company declared bankruptcy and laid off all 1,100 employees, despite a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, and just a day after a House hearing on the loan guarantee process, the Obama administration is finally hitting back at the claims that Solyndra was actually the most visibile indicator of a failing green-jobs initiative on The White House Blog.
Specifically, the White House has chosen to push back against a piece published on Wednesday at The Washington Post reporting that the DOE’s $38.6 billion clean energy loan guarantee program, launched under President Bush but ramped with President Obama’s stimulus funding, has created only 3,545 “new, permanent jobs,” compared to the 65,000 predicted.
The Post piece pivots largely around one number – some 33,000 jobs that the DOE claims were saved at Ford thanks to the a $5.9 million loan guarantee used to upgrade Ford plants into flexible manufacturing plants, allowing them to produce both gas-guzzlers and fuel-efficient vehicles.
The Post seeks to poke holes in the DOE taking credit for all of these jobs, citing “several economists” – Harvard Professor of investment banking Josh Lerner and Mark Muro, a Brookings Institute Fellow, who “said the agency appears to be counting every employee working in upgraded plants, when the more relevant question is how many workers would have been laid off without the loans.” (It’s worth noting a Ford spokesperson also backed the DOE numbers to The Post).
At the White House Blog, Dan Leistikow, director of the DOE office of public affairs, posted a response mainatinaing the legitimacy of that figure and added a few more, including 7,300 new construction jobs and “supply chain jobs,” which he admitted “aren’t reflected in official government estimates.”
Leistikow also wrote:
What’s critically important and completely ignored by the Washington Post, is that the value of this program can’t be measured in operating jobs alone. The investments are helping to build a new clean energy industry here in America. We are now on pace to double renewable energy generation from wind and solar from the time the President took office. Yet we are still in danger of falling behind China and other nations that are competing aggressively for leadership in these technologies. This is a race we can and will win, but only if we make these investments today. These investments will pay dividends not just in today’s jobs but in entire industries and supply chains – and in cleaner air and water for our children and grandchildren.
While the U.S. is indeed falling behind China when it comes to total solar panel production, one American solar CEO disputed the claims that Chinese competition had much of anything to do with Solyndra’s bankruptcy.
As for Leistikow’s central claim, that “we are now on pace to double renewable energy generation from wind and solar from the time the President took office,” analysts at GTM Research, the market research arm of Greentech Media, found that a laughable assertion – because it was so low.
“That’s actually an extraordinarily conservative view,” GTM Research managing director Shayle Kann told TPM by phone. “The solar industry well more than doubled the amount of generation from photovoltaic installations in 2010 alone. We expect to nearly double again this year.”
(Photovoltaic, which converts sunlight to electricity on the atomic level using materials such as polysilicon, is the most common type of solar installation in the U.S. – comprising 82 percent of the industry.)
Kann cited GTM Research figures showing a 104 percent increase in solar photovoltaic installations in 2010, up to 887 megawatts, or enough to power 160,000 homes. GTM Research notes that the market was on track to grow 72 percent this year but says this number could rise if the second-half of the year proves to be as fertile as they think.
Kann pointed to his recent testimony before the House Committee on Natural Resources on Sept. 8 in a hearing on renewable energy job creation. In his testimony, he noted that “We stand at a critical juncture in the development of the solar power market in the U.S. Many companies, both manufacturers and installers, are just beginning to invest in the U.S. market to gain a foothold in case it truly reaches a tipping point… Now we need continued private investment and a stable, reliable policy landscape in order to realize the market’s potential.”
Correction: This article originally misspelled Shayle Kann’s surname. We apologize for the error.
