GE Dumps Offshore Wind-Power Plans AFTER Collecting $125 Million In Stimulus From Taxpayers For Wind Projects
Best friends Obama and Immelt applaud as GE screws taxpayers once again.
GE was awarded 44 contracts totaling over $46,000,000 and 44 grants totaling more than $79,000,000 from the Obama-Pelosi $757 billion dollar stimulus package. Millions of dollars in stimulus funds were used by GE in green energy projects.
Today GE announced that it was going to gut its offshore wind-power plans.
Forbes reported:
General Electric, the U.S.-based industrial giant and leading manufacturer of wind-power turbines, is scaling back efforts to expand its presence in the offshore wind power market.
The rationale: there is no meaningful offshore wind market to speak of – at least not yet. Given slower-than-expected industry growth, the offshore market may not mature as rapidly as many wind boosters once believed. In 2009, GE moved into the offshore market by acquiring Norway’s ScanWind, a developer of direct-drive turbines, based in the city of Trondheim.
GE is considering laying off about 40 employees in Norway as it scales-back its offshore operations there, according to reports in Recharge. The company has also suspended plans to construct a manufacturing facility in the United Kingdom indefinitely.
Immelt also said the stimulus would work way back in April 2009.
GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s Economic Advisory Panel, was invited to sit with the First Lady during the president’s speech to Congress this past week. He’s been a strong supporter of the president since he took over the White House and his companies have received plenty of government funds as well.
First lady Michelle Obama (4th L) and Vice President Joe Biden’s wife, Jill, (2nd R) clap from the front row of the First Lady’s Box before the start of President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington September 8, 2011. Others in the box are: (top row 3rd L- 2nd R) General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, AOL co-founder Steve Case, Permac Industries CEO Darlene Miller and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, and (front row L-R) Philip Maung, Gracey Ibarra, Kelcie Fisher,Obama, Joseph Kidd, Biden and Marlena Clark. (REUTERS/Jim Bourg)
Oct 1, 2011 at 11:39 AM
Reader Comments (119)
http://www.elp.com/index/display/article-display/8399086149/articles/electric-light-power/renewable-energy/wind/2011/06/GE-__GAMA-owned_wind_farm_now_powering_Turkey.html
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-09/15/c_131138880.htm
:)
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,338580,00.html
Before its messy decline and fall, Enron had plenty of clout in George W. Bush's Washington, from the personal ties between chairman Ken Lay and the President to the company's alleged influence on Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. But Enron's cozy relationship with Washington didn't start there. Documents obtained by TIME show the energy giant enjoyed much closer ties with Clinton Administration regulators than was generally known.
Lest see here, the executives at UPC/First Wind started their careers at GE capital and then joined Enron in London. UPC is rather famous in Italy too…
GE still has not responded publically about their reactors in Fukushima. Was that external emergency cooling system and storing all spent fuel on top of the reactors a Japanese idea? How about chopping away the hill so the reactors were right down next to sea level? Next to the fault line like with so many American fission plants? In the middle of the most active tsunami zone on earth? Somebody must be thinking they are pretty darn clever (PDC).
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/another-popular-name-emerges-solyndra-scandal
Gore-Backed Car Firm Gets Large U.S. Loan .
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125383160812639013.html
[snip]
A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.
Is The White House In DE Shaw's Pocket?
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-white-house-in-de-shaws-pocket.html
[snip]
Larry Summers, who was not only Tim Geithner's predecessor as the 71st Secretary of the Treasury (from 1999 to 2001), but also the 27th President of Harvard University, and is currently the top White House economic advisor and serves as a director of the National Economic Council, apparently has a fond place in his heart and bank account for his most recent employer, $30 billion rocket scientist infested hedge fund D. E. Shaw (nothing like signing an NDA before conducting interviews). In a financial disclosure just released by the White House, Larry highlights that not only was he paid $2 million in 2008 from 40 speaking assignments, including speeches paid for by Goldman Sachs and Yale University, but, more notably, received $5.2 million in compensation from D.E. Shaw - one of the funds eligible and likely to participate in the PPIP and TALF.
Moving along:
http://edgar.brand.edgar-online.com/EFX_dll/EDGARpro.dll?FetchFilingHtmlSection1?SectionID=6187735-750970-779669&SessionID=_-RfHS0AHfsw027
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/solyndras-whorehouse-lender
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2011/08/15/where-federal-energy-subsidies-really-go/
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=194395
[snip]
... into a wood chipper.
A Solyndra Insider's Words
[snip]
On the Importance of the Failed 2009 IPO
Note: S1 is the SEC document for an Initial Public Offering. Fab 1&2 are the company’s manufacturing facilities
The original plan was to have Fab 1 operating on a "almost at profit basis" (a proof of concept + - type level), then use an IPO to fund the next push into economies of scale. Or use strategic partnerships and sovereign relationships to that.
Flashback 2010:
http://www.pressherald.com/business/first-wind-stays-course-after-ipo-fails_2010-10-29.html
[snip]
First Wind has two large financial backers, the D.E. Shaw hedge fund firm and Madison Dearborn, a private equity firm. But the company has debt exceeding $500 million, and had planned to use money from the IPO to pay down loans.
READ about the FIRST WIND Connection to the Obama Administration
Industrial Wind and the Wall Street Cap and Trade Fraud
********************************************************************
TEN Reasons
Why the SEC should not allow First Wind to be listed on NASDAQ
First Wind Holdings Inc. 12/22/09 SEC S1/A IPO Filing
First Wind Holdings Inc. 7/31/08 SEC S1 IPO Filing
May 14, 2010 addition to the First Wind Holdings Inc. SEC S1A IPO Filing
August 18, 2010 amendment 7 to the First Wind Holdings Inc. SEC S1A IPO Filing
October 13, 2010 Filing update to the First Wind Holdings Inc. SEC S1A IPO Filing
New October 25, 2010 Filing update to the First Wind Holdings Inc. SEC S1A IPO Filing
FIRST WIND Lays an Egg WITHDRAWS IPO
after Wall Street no confidence in company
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63810.html
http://www.windforillinois.org/news/rahm-emanuel-touts-chicago-as-wind-industry-business-center.html
Ahem: I will remain silent for now..............
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/09/solar-circa-1994-enron/
[This post reproduces verbatim a front-page story in the New York Times business section that excitedly reported a breakthrough with solar energy as represented by a heady energy company named Enron. Formed in the mid-1980s, Enron had just entered into the solar business and was destined to revitalize--if not save--the U.S. wind industry just a few years later.]
http://www.masterresource.org/2010/09/enron-saved-us-wind-revisited/
[snip]
Enron Wind would never turn a profit, and it would be sold in May 2002 by the bankrupt parent to GE. (GE and Enron would have other ominous parallels.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/business/07norris1.html
[snip]
It is notable how this investigation came to be. Post-Enron, the commission used its authority to look at G.E.’s books to figure out whether there were violations in the area of so-called hedge accounting, which determines whether companies can avoid reporting profits and losses from a variety of derivative securities.
http://www.wind-watch.org/alerts/2011/09/22/tell-the-deficit-reduction-committee-to-end-wind-subsidies/
The House passed CR 2012 (Continuing Resolution 2012) before going home to their districts for a week.
This latest CR is needed to fund the government until November 18.
On Friday (Sep 23) the Senate voted NO complaining the bill took DOE loan guarantee money to fund FEMA disaster relief. DOE loans guarantee Solyndra and your local wind projects.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
The Senate's 'NO VOTE' WAS NOT ABOUT DISASTER RELIEF
The Senate's 'NO VOTE' WAS ABOUT KEEPING DOE's LOAN GUARANTEE PROGRAM FUNDED
-- even after the SOLYNDRA debacle --
From: Cohocton Wind Watch
Note: I have professionally measured the wind resource at several sites (in the past) where projects were just announced (and some already in operation) that I know for a fact cannot work on any meaningful scale. The projects were started (imho) to qualify for more federal funding (due to deadlines) and nothing else.
Disclosure: I no longer work in the industry and had in the past operated a business specializing in meteorological studies used specifically for wind energy applications.
http://uspolitics.einnews.com/pr-news/100102-iberdrola-has-received-867-million-in-energy-stimulus-funds
[snip]
Spanish renewable energy company Iberdrola says it has received $867 million in stimulus grants from the US government.
Iberdrola, which has a US subsidiary in Portland, recently received the largest stimulus grant given by the government for a single renewable energy project, $170 million for a wind energy project south of Chicago.
http://bangordailynews.com/2011/09/23/news/portland/george-mitchell-climate-change-skepticism-will-%E2%80%98not-last%E2%80%99/?ref=region
George is affilated with DLA Piper who has a very significant interest in Carbon markets(especially their Australian affiliate) and renewable energy.
http://www.dlapiper.com/george_mitchell/
http://www.dlapiper.com/preparing-for-the-doe-renewable-energy-rapid-deployment-loan-guarantees/
http://bangordailynews.com/2011/09/25/business/merger-may-impact-nation%e2%80%99s-first-offshore-wind-farm/
[snip]
A pending merger between NStar and Northeast Utilities has become a possible pressure point to get NStar to buy Cape Wind power.
Since the merger was announced last year, regulators added a requirement that such deals must advance the state’s clean energy goals, which include developing offshore wind. The state also made a request, still pending, to stay proceedings for a review of the merger’s effect on rates — a lengthy process that could lead to a merger-killing delay.
The moves are obvious attempts to pressure NStar to buy power from a favored private developer, said Republican state Rep. Brad Jones, minority leader in the Massachusetts House.
“[It’s] the great administration shakedown of NStar,” he said.
In The Wall Street Journal, environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration of “trying to hold hostage the proposed NStar-Northeast Utilities merger unless the two electric companies agree to buy Cape Wind’s power.” ....
.......No other state utility has since signed on, and NStar is the only one large enough to buy a significant chunk of Cape Wind’s output.
Without committed buyers for all its power, Cape Wind is unlikely to find financing for the full $2.6 billion project, which it plans to begin operating in 2013.
It could try to move a smaller project forward. But if Cape Wind builds 110 turbines or fewer, National Grid must pay more for the power, according to its contract.
GE selects contractor to dredge PCBs from Hudson
http://poststar.com/news/local/article_514dc924-6153-11e0-9d61-001cc4c002e0.html
[snip]
GE announced Wednesday that it has selected Cashman Dredging & Marine Contracting Co. LLC, to perform environmental dredging in the upper river beginning in May. The massive cleanup project is expected to take five to seven years
You might want to look at this...
http://www.patriotrenewables.com/
http://bangordailynews.com/2011/09/25/business/maine-doesnt-need-wind-power-group-says/
[snip]
He spoke to the Sun Journal the same day his organization was sponsoring a lecture by John Droz at the University of Maine in Orono. Droz is a retired physicist who specializes in energy education and public policy.
“Some advertisements say wind energy is free,” Droz said. “Wind is certainly free, but generating electricity from wind is expensive and people need to be aware of these distinctions.”
The main controversy surrounding wind farms is renewable energy certificates, O’Neil said. Maine law requires each electric utility company to purchase a certain percentage of RECs to prove that they are producing renewable energy.
Maine’s goal is to have 10 percent of electricity come from new forms of renewable generation by 2017.
According to O’Neil, Maine wind-farm projects are using false advertisements to buy into these RECs and profit from federal money.
“Wind power is unnecessary, unsustainable, unaffordable and useless,” O’Neil said....
....Tom Carroll, project coordinator with Patriot Renewables LLC, which is building wind farms in Dixfield, Woodstock and Carthage, said technically, the electricity his projects are creating is being sold to an entity in Massachusetts.
“It all goes into the grid and gets distributed from there, though. So there is no way to really track who is using whose electricity,” Carroll said.
http://www.creators.com/conservative/ben-shapiro/thousands-of-jobs-scammed-or-created.html
[snip]
Broke and under investigation. Not exactly a great candidate for stimulus. But that didn't stop the Obama administration. Why? Because First Wind is supported principally by Madison Dearborn Partners and the D.E. Shaw Group.
Madison Dearborn Partners, not coincidentally, is Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's "best source of funds," according to the Washington Examiner. During his congressional career, employees of Madison Dearborn gave Emanuel $93,600. And Emanuel is instrumental in oversight of the stimulus.
As for D.E. Shaw, White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers was paid $5.2 million in 2008 and 2007 by the company — to work for one day a week, according to the New York Times. Also according to the Times, "Summers said in an interview that his experience at Shaw, however brief, gave him valuable insight into the practical realities of Wall Street, insight he is now putting to use in shaping economic policy in the White House."
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire
[snip]
On Monday night, Congressional leaders resolved – at least for now – a dispute over offsetting the cost of emergency disaster aid that threatened to partially shut down the government and cut funding for two Energy Department programs.
http://bangordailynews.com/2011/09/26/business/airborne-wind-turbines-to-be-tested-in-limestone/?ref=latest
[snip]
The company is led by alumni of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Company officials could not be reached for comment ...
.....Presently, Science Applications International Corporation is leasing part of the arch hanger. They will allow Altaeros employees to share the building’s unused space.
Note: Who is SAIC?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070203415.html
Oh, they also do data mining, drones and all kinds of other stuff...
http://my.firedoglake.com/frank33/tag/sibel-edmonds/
http://truthfrequencynews.com/?p=3128
http://theominousparallels.blogspot.com/2011/05/nsasaic-trailblazer-cover-up-911-and_23.html
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/184515-gops-solyndra-probe-threatens-to-ensnare-energy-sec-chu
http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/09/29/6774/bundlers-inside
[snip]
Several of Barack Obama’s top campaign supporters went from soliciting political contributions to working from within the Energy Department as it showered billions in taxpayer-backed stimulus money on alternative energy firms, iWatch News and ABC News have learned.
One of them was Steven J. Spinner, a high-tech consultant and investor in energy companies who raised at least $500,000 for Obama. He became one of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s key loan programs advisors while his wife’s law firm represented a number of the companies that had applied for loans.
http://bangordailynews.com/2011/10/04/business/international-development-group-meets-in-orono/
BTW, the Solyndra thingy is widening.
That said. Here is an outstanding piece from the good folks at Master Resource.
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/10/green-jobs-fallacies-counterfacts/
http://www.cohoctonwindwatch.blogspot.com/
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/186101-head-of-energy-departments-loan-guarantee-program-to-resign
This weekend in Boston,350 dot org plans a protest at the JFK School Of Government. It will be about a pipeline and not the banks. Larry Summers is involved in this especially with his association to the Wind Boondoggle. Ironically, Larry Summers also recently got a new job...at the JFK School Of Government.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7384062n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox
No Risk?
http://blogs.reuters.com/trnewsmaker/2011/10/13/wait-now-the-right-hates-general-electric/
[snip]
For many years, the River Café, an elegant restaurant that sits just below the Brooklyn Bridge, had a plaque on its wall declaring, in effect, “If you work for General Electric, go eat somewhere else.”
This unusual exclusion policy had a simple explanation: for three decades, two GE plants in upstate New York dumped as much as 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River, poisoning the fish supply that River Café depends on. The effect that this contamination had on wildlife—and on anyone who ate too much fish caught in the Hudson—was severe enough to create one of the largest Superfund projects in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency.....
......There are three political aspects of the right’s attack on GE which, while a little sudden and certainly open to charges of hypocrisy, are easy to explain. First, in many cases, the attackers try to establish an explicit link between GE and the Solyndra affair, hoping to whip up voter anger over the idea that government in general, and the Obama administration in particular, is throwing money at companies and thereby reviving that scary industrial-policy no-no of picking winners and losers.
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Ok folks, let me elaborate a moment on the first paragraph. GE did make a mess on the Hudson and earlier this year selected contractor Cashman Dredging & Marine Contracting Co. LLC to dredge the river.
http://poststar.com/news/local/article_514dc924-6153-11e0-9d61-001cc4c002e0.html
Now for Paragraph 2. It is not solyndra per se, but the loan guarantees, grants etc. wasting monumental amounts of money for technologies that provide no real public benefit and are not reliable nor properly sited. Lets look at some more cronyism.
Cashman also owns another company, Patriot Renewables, who are currently putting up GE wind turbines in Maine.
http://www.patriotrenewables.com/
Now there is a Chicago (Rolling Meadows) based company, LE Myers (Myers Group- stock quote MYR)
http://www.myrgroup.com/
who is the prime contractor for a billion dollar transmission line to accommodate all this wind, which includes a company known as First Wind (and it's 75 or so shell corporations) who use nothing but GE wind turbines. I have gone into larry Summers involvement in this fiasco before, but this cronyism and ill use of public funds for technologies that do not effectively work as advertised and cannot compete in an open and fair market can be compared to the Solyndra fiasco, only a much more costly version.
http://blogs.reuters.com/ask/2011/10/14/ask-jeffrey-immelt/
[snip]
Reuters Digital Editor Chrystia Freeland interviews General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt on the U.S. economy, the jobs crisis and GE’s future on Monday October 17 beginning at 8:30am EDT. What would you like to ask Immelt? Post your questions as comments on this post or tweet them to #newsmaker.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/17/us-ge-immelt-idUSTRE79G2L220111017
[snip]
DEFENDS WHITE HOUSE ROLE
Last week, the White House advisory panel Immelt heads submitted a report to the Obama administration saying that attracting more foreign capital, being more aggressive in energy policy and investing in infrastructure could help create jobs in an economy struggling with high unemployment.
Immelt, a lifelong Republican, has drawn fire from some shareholders for his work with the Democratic Obama administration. The Cincinnati-born CEO defended his role, saying GE executives have long had a voice in Washington.
"It's an important time," he said. "People need to try. I'd rather be in the arena trying that not doing what I can to help."
Immelt has repeatedly said that GE, which employs some 287,000 people worldwide, expects to hire about 15,000 people this year. Less that half GE's employees work in the United States, a fact that Immelt is unapologetic about, saying that it reflects that the company expects to generate 60 percent of its forecast $148.13 billion in 2012 revenue outside its home country.
The company views Russia as a major focus for growth over the next decade, and is also investing in resource-rich African countries including Mozambique, Angola, Nigeria and South Africa, Immelt said