Friday's Document Dump Loan Guarantee Dump

The Department of Energy slipped in five billion more in loan guarantees on Friday before the midnight deadline. But unlike Solyndra, I'm sure these investments aren't sloppy. After all, Nobel Prize winner Stephen Chu is in charge.

The embattled department announced approvals for a total of more than $4.7 billion in guarantees Friday — acting hours before the program's congressional authorization was set to expire, and seeming not at all like an agency cowed by the furor over its troubled $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra.

. . .

As of 6 p.m., DOE had yet to announce whether it was approving or rejecting two more conditional loan guarantees on which it must act before midnight.

. . .

Friday's total is in addition to more than $1.2 billion in guarantees that the department issued earlier in the week.

I wonder if there are a lot of Obama donors and bundlers in those organizations. Surely not. Chu issued this statement:

“To win the clean energy race we must invest in projects like this that fund jobs and increase the generation of clean, renewable power in the U.S.,” Chu said in a statement. “Deployment of utility-scale solar power will help bring down the cost of solar and strengthen our position as a global clean energy leader.”

So there's a clean energy race. Just like the space race. And we have to win it. Because it's important to be the global clean energy leader and not let Russia or China beat us. That way we'll have all the braggin' rights. More at the Washington Post.

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posted by rdbrewer at 10:18 AM

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