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Steven Mufson in today’s Washington Post [2] chronicles the track reward of government picking energy winners:
Solyndra, the solar-panel maker that received more than half a billion dollars in federal loans [3] from the Obama administration only to go bankrupt this fall, isn’t the first dud for U.S. government officials trying to play venture capitalist in the energy industry.
The Clinch River Breeder Reactor. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The hydrogen car. Clean coal. These are but a few examples spanning several decades — a graveyard of costly and failed projects.
Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra. An Energy Department report [4] in 2008 estimated that the federal government had spent $172 billion since 1961 on basic research and the development of advanced energy technologies.