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Illuminative comment. > This is one of the things that killed Solyndra (just one of). Non-American here. Why did that kill Solyndra? (a solar business?)

• gumby 5y ago
  Solyndra’s approach was to use thin film solar PV (lower efficiency than standard polycrystalline cells) and put it into a transparent tube. The value prop was the following: installation is expensive, and risky on rooftops because you have to make through holes in your roof. Also the panels are heavy, subject to wind loading etc, thus putting panels on the roof is usually not worth it, or at least was not a dozen years ago. But the tubes were very light and since they had a small cross-section they win will just flow right through them so you could just secure the installation with guy wires and not actually cut holes in the roof, and use less labor do do so. Also you wouldn’t have over heating and other issues of commercial panels. Unfortunately, the efficiency really wasn’t that high. And there was also the structural financial issue that I discussed. So a double whammy. Solyndra got a high risk loan from ARPA-E that was used in a high profile way by the GOP to beat up all government investment in alternative technologies. High risk and sure, it failed. The point of ARPA (now DARPA) is to invest in high risk “out there” projects — like, say, that stupid packet switching idea for connecting computers. The idea of ARPA-E was to do the same for energy projects. For some reason climate related work causes a fuss, while there’s always money for something “defense” related.