THE MORNING RANT - Another Generation of Solyndras: Government Subsidized “Clean Fuel” Startups Are Failing

Do you remember Solyndra, the “green energy” company which received over half a billion dollars from President Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” in 2009? Solyndra was going to revolutionize the solar panel manufacturing industry. Of course, there was abundant fraud, both on the company’s application and in the government’s awarding of all that tax money. Solyndra went bankrupt and ceased operations barely two years later, leaving 1,100 employees out of work.

Unsurprisingly, a whole new generation of Solyndras popped up in recent years, promising to develop various new forms of “clean energy” for which there is not a market, especially not at the price it would take to develop the product. Fortunately for these start-ups, we have very credulous people in government willing to dole out taxpayer money whenever the words “clean energy” are spoken. Plus, a great many investors are easily duped into throwing money at “revolutionary” new energy sources.

But no matter how much money is thrown at these ventures, there is generally no pathway to profit when competing against fossil fuels.

A recent Wall Street Journal article comically laments the supposed impact to the climate from all these failing green energy projects, but it also gives an excellent rundown on the extensive number of these ventures that are failing.

“Clean-Fuel Startups Were Supposed to Be the Next Big Thing, Now They Are Collapsing; Hydrogen and biofuel projects have become money pits” [WSJ – 8/18/2024]

Startups promising to power planes, ships and trucks with clean fuel are sputtering before they get off the ground, showing how hard it will be to wean many industries off oil and gas.

The widely-accepted belief that industries need to be “weaned off oil and gas” is destructively wrong. Just because a religious cult has chosen petroleum to serve the role of its Satan-figure is no reason for the rest of us to acquiesce to their decivilizational jihad.

A company backed by United Airlines that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to turn trash into jet fuel appears to have shut down. Another, backed by Airbus, JetBlue and GE Aerospace, that was working on using hydrogen to power planes went bust. Chevron, BP and Shell, meanwhile, are scaling back projects to make biofuels from cooking fats, oils, greases and plant material.

If these prominent corporations and their woke CEOs decided to invest in a new line of perpetual motion machines, it wouldn’t be any more laughable than the “clean energy” investments into which they flushed away their shareholders’ cash. Don’t ever think a corner office in the C-suites is indicative of an executive’s intelligence.

“The excitement of the early days has not lived up to the hype,” said Andy Marsh, chief executive of Plug Power, a startup that recently opened one of the country’s first plants making green hydrogen, a potential replacement for fossil fuels in industries such as steel making and chemical production. Shares of Plug Power have tumbled more than 90% since the passage of the U.S. climate law two years ago. Shares of biofuels startup Gevo, where Marsh is a board member, are down about 80% in that span.

The shares of these companies have collapsed because there is a lack of revenue, and therefore a lack of profits. Without actual customers buying their products, the critical source of cash for these companies is taxpayer subsidies.

LanzaJet will soon start production at a Georgia plant, one of the first for sustainable aviation fuel in the U.S. Construction ended up being a lot more expensive than the company expected. The company’s fuel, which is made from ethanol, costs about twice as much as conventional jet fuel without subsidies.

What a great business plan! LanzaJet’s fuel costs twice as much as regular petroleum-based jet fuel, so it requires taxpayer subsidization to make up for the loss incurred by selling fuel at market prices.

Good ol’ Plug Power is also reliant on subsidies for it to be able to operate…

In the U.S., the slow rollout of domestic subsidies and weak demand is pushing Plug Power and competitors such as Electric Hydrogen to expand overseas, upending expectations from when the climate law passed.

“…the slow rollout of domestic subsidies and weak demand” can be translated as meaning there is a lack of actual customer demand for the product, therefore the only revenue source that can keep companies such as these alive is governmental subsidies. But apparently the subsidies can’t keep up with the cash burn.

This makes me laugh - United Airlines diverted money that might have otherwise been used for Capex or improving operations to engage in green virtue signaling. The money is gone…

One casualty appears to be Fulcrum BioEnergy, the startup backed by United that said it could turn trash into jet fuel. The company had developed the process for more than 15 years and operated a plant in Nevada before missing bond payments. Its website appears to no longer be up. Efforts to reach executives were unsuccessful. United declined to comment.

Also unsurprising, with all this money being thrown around, there is a lot of corruption:

In some cases, the problems are internal. Alder Fuels, a startup turning biomass into fuel, is continuing to work on its technology after founder and CEO Bryan Sherbacow was found guilty of embezzling, then replaced, a spokesman said.

If I can return to LanzaJet for just a moment, the state of Georgia is apparently infested with elected officials of both parties who believe that the path to business growth and new jobs is to throw taxpayer money at green boondoggles.

“Sen. Ossoff Accelerating Sustainable Aviation Fuel Development in Georgia” [Office of Senator Jon Ossoff – 8/20/2024]

Sen. Ossoff is delivering $3,096,047 to LanzaJet, a sustainable aviation fuel producer, to support their new production facility in Soperton, Georgia…

In this next article, it becomes painfully clear that Georgia’s Public Service Commissioner (who is a Republican) has absolutely no understanding of how a for-profit business operates. He is clearly oblivious to the fact that a normal business produces income by selling products to customers, not by obtaining grants and taxpayer subsidies.

“Rural Georgia gets world's first sustainable jet fuel factory of its kind” [Georgia Public Broadcasting - 01/25/2024]

“They're joining the ranks of many others that are coming here as a result of Georgia being such a great place to do business,” Georgia Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols, a Republican, said. “I mean, would you ever think that a ruby-red state like Georgia would capture so much of this clean energy money? Rivian Hyundai, SK Battery, the largest solar plant in North America. We are just gobbling it up.”

“Republican” Tim Echols and his ilk are open fans of “corporate communism,” in which the wealth of citizens is confiscated through taxation and then redistributed to government-favored corporations whose primary source of revenue is government subsidies.

To paraphrase George Orwell: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Redistributed wealth is profit.

For those of us who champion actual free enterprise, these government-subsidized “clean energy” companies are an abomination. Their failure is necessary, not only to save us from the anti-carbon Net Zero agenda, but also to save free-market capitalism.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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