July 16, 2012 11:25 PM UTC

Off The Solyndra Reservation With Scott Tipton

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• by: Colorado Pols

Recapping this weekend’s swing through the eastern part of his district, the Pueblo Chieftain’s Gayle Perez reports on the continuing foibles of embattled freshman Rep. Scott Tipton:

Tipton was in Pueblo Friday where he toured the Vestas plant and met with senior citizens as part of two-day Southern Colorado Tour that includes visits to several communities in the San Luis Valley…

He also visited the Cogentrix solar plant in northern Alamosa County, which was the beneficiary of a $90 million loan guarantee from the the U.S. Department of Energy.

Tipton was quick to criticize the work of that program with Solyndra, a California solar panel maker that received a much bigger guarantee and went bankrupt, costing taxpayers $535 million and raising the ire of congressional Republicans.

But he did say that because of financial reforms done by the previous Congress, capital was much harder to come by. “Government, if we’re going to be making those types of guarantees for some developing technologies that are going to be there, they can get it from the private sector,” he said. “We can maybe encourage that but it has to be done very judiciously.”

Catch that? It’s very subtle so you might miss it. Solyndra bad, Cogentrix (in Tipton’s district) maybe okay! Unfortunately, the conservative Independence Institute isn’t playing along:

In the shadow of the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal, the embattled Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program announced on September 9, a $90.6 million loan guarantee to Cogentrix Energy of Alamosa for a solar energy project…100 jobs is a bit optimistic. According to the DOE, the project will create or save 10 permanent jobs, which means the cost per job “created or saved” is $9.6 million.  However, if we include the 75 temporary construction jobs, the cost per job is a mere $1,065,882.35.

Conservative budget “guru” Paul Ryan doesn’t leave Tipton much wiggle room either:

By picking winners and losers in the energy sector, the government-as-investor model distorts markets, weakens the rule of law, and fails to spur sustainable job creation. Instead of helping the economy, the story ends with taxpayers losing billions of dollars, successful companies losing their competitive advantage, and workers losing their jobs – in Solyndra’s case, 1,100 of them.

But in a press release printed in a solar industry trade publication, a very different picture of those much-maligned loan guarantees emerges, and Tipton’s view of them:

The project by Cogentrix generates 40% efficient power, double the efficiency of PV, through a CPV technology that utilizes concentrating optics and multi-junction solar cell panels and a dual-axis tracking system.

Freeman explained the importance of their DOE solar loan guarantee, a program that is not popular within Tipton’s party in congress.”With an unproven technology, we couldn’t get a loan from a bank,” Freeman told the congressman. “This has made it a bit uncomfortable for us, but it is a poster project for success.” [Pols emphasis]

“I think it is impressive,” Tipton said [Pols emphasis] after learning about the technology and standing under one of the 28,000 square foot arrays Friday afternoon. “Here in the third district, in Alamosa County, we have the world’s largest solar facility and just look at the technology.”

Bottom line: Tipton is forced to backpedal standard GOP rhetoric against the Department of Energy’s renewable energy loan guarantee program for the same reason that Rep. Cory Gardner steered clear of similar criticism where it concerned now-bankrupt Abound Solar in Gardner’s district. The fact is, renewable energy technology is not as safe an investment as oil extraction, and just like the development of  traditional energy extraction–like “fracking,” for example–has been subsidized by the government, these technologies require incubation before they achieve profitability. The high-profile failures in solar power investment like Solyndra are attributable to global competition, namely the alleged “dumping” of sub-cost panels on the U.S. market by China, more than any sort of malfeasance by the DOE or the companies involved.

If there’s any accountability at all, Scott Tipton will never be able to deny that again.