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i rst of many similar guarantees of ered to other clean energy i rms.
In May 2010, President Obama himself visited the company, further
establishing it as a model not just for American energy but also for the
economy at large.
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h e bankruptcy announcement quickly turned an example of
everything good about renewable energy into a symbol of all its l aws.
Alternative energy, critics declared, was not ready for prime time; had
there been a real market for its products, Solyndra would not have failed.
Worse was what the episode apparently revealed about the relationship
between renewable energy and government. Solyndra, they said, existed
only because government bureaucrats had handed it hundreds of mil-
lions of taxpayer dollars. At best, its executives squandered that money,
in the process destroying more than a thousand jobs. At worst, some
pundits and political operatives darkly suggested, the pile of cash was
an invitation to crony capitalism, with money simply steered to the
president's political friends.
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Here, in one small company, was everything that many people found
wrong with alternative energy. h e technology was nowhere close to
being ready to compete with fossil fuels. h is meant it required so
much government intervention that corruption and incompetence were
inevitable results. It certainly wasn't a recipe for economic revival; one
merely needed to ask the laid-of Solyndra employees about that. Nor
did an economically unviable suite of technologies hold much prom-
ise for dealing with climate change. Meanwhile, as the public began to
question the prospects of new energy technologies, the shale gas boom
began to unfold.
h e apparent convergence around alternatives that seemed at hand in
2008 was shat ered. Renewable energy was at once thriving and under
intense i re. One side pointed to falling costs, opportunities for innova-
tion, a growing number of clean energy jobs, and lower greenhouse gas
emissions. h e other emphasized the relatively high price of renewable
energy, insisted that government was ill positioned to boost jobs or
innovation, and noted there were other ways to cut emissions; it also
emphasized that renewable energy had environmental risks of its own.
h
e bat le lines between old and new energy, and between governments
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