“I thought the White House might want to take advantage of this event to highlight a highly successful public/private partnership.”
-- Obama adviser David Prend in an email to a White House aide encouraging the president to publicly embrace Solyndra, a solar-panel manufacturer that Prend’s investment firm partly owned.
The latest figure to emerge in Soylndra green-jobs scandal is David Prend, a co-founder of the Boston-based venture capital firm Rockport Capital, who used his role as a green energy adviser to the Obama administration to push for a half-billion-dollar subsidized loan for Solyndra even though his company was a major investor in the solar-panel manufacturer.
Emails obtained by congressional investigators show that Prend was perhaps the first to push for Solyndra inside the administration, touting the company in a February 2009 meeting with Carol Browner, President Obama’s former global warming and energy czar. At the time, Prend’s firm held a 7.5 percent stake in Solyndra.
Prend also pushed for Solyndra to be included in a Navy contract as part of the administration’s plan to switch the military to green energy. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Navy effort came in the spring of this year, long after it was clear that the company was kaput. The Navy seemed to be on the cusp of including Solyndra in the $1 million pilot project, but had to drop the well-connected firm as bankruptcy approached in September.
The Navy deal came after Rockport and other investors agreed to a $75 million rescue loan package to keep Solyndra afloat after the firm’s initial violation of the federal loan agreement at the end of last year.
The other inside man on the Solyndra loan was Steve Spinner, a former NBC executive who became a green energy guru who helped steer energy and environmental policy for the administration starting in the 2008 transition team. Spinner pushed for Solyndra to get the loan even though his wife was the lawyer for the now defunct solar firm.
But the best friend Solyndra had was George Kaiser, whose family foundation was the largest investor in the firm. Kaiser made 16 trips to the White House between March 2009 and April 2011 to consult with officials. Kaiser, a billionaire devoted to liberal causes who donated $53,500 to Obama’s 2008 campaign and raised may times more, has said that he didn’t lobby for the government loan. But the frequent presence of such an important patron who was visibly attached to Solyndra would have been an encouragement of its own.
Treasury officials will today testify in the ongoing congressional probe into the loan. They will be asked to explain emails that show that many at Treasury had opposed making the loan, including Secretary Timothy Geithner. Obama disregarded Geithner’s warnings on the project and backed Energy Secretary Steven Chu (Obama’s fellow Nobel laureate) in proceeding with the loan despite market indicators.
Why did Chu and so many at the White House plow ahead with the loans despite the warnings that the company’s business model was already a bust? They were betting on change.
No matter how influential the backers, no president would authorize such a huge loan on the belief that it would be a failure. But the Obama team was willing to go along with Prend, Skinner and Kaiser for one simple reason: The president had a plan to make carbon costly.
Emails from senior Energy Department advisers Matt Rogers and Rod O’Connor from May of 2010 make it clear that as the company was starting to go down, the last hope was for the Democratically dominated Congress to finally push through a global warming bill that would make traditional energy sources more expensive and drive up demand for less efficient but less polluting solar cells.
Whatever the flaws in the Solyndra business model, the president likely saw only upside in siding with his donors and key advisers on Solyndra. Remember that in February 2009, no one in Washington would have doubted that Obama would succeed in imposing his plan to require businesses to purchase transferable credits for the right to emit carbon dioxide, or at least something that would have made energy more expensive.
A handful of moderate Senate Democrats stopped the president’s plan. But had he succeeded, higher energy costs and the chance for companies to earn extra credits for the right to use other, more efficient energy sources by buying solar panels would have made Solynrda profitable, however bad its original business plan had been.
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