Fact Checker Vaporizes Steven Chu

By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post

“Through the loan programs, the Energy Department is supporting 38 clean energy projects that are expected to employ more than 60,000 Americans, generate enough clean electricity to power nearly 3 million homes and displace more than 300 million gallons of gasoline annually.”

— Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Nov. 17, 2011, in testimony on Capitol Hill

“When the bottom of a market falls out and the price of solar decreases by 70 percent in two and a half years, that was totally unexpected, not only by us — if you look at the range of predictions that were being made by financial analysts from the last quarter of 2008, 2009, they — the average — there are some outliers. But the average of those were not expecting these prices to plummet. And so fundamentally this company [Solyndra] and several others got caught in a very, very bad tsunami, if you will.”

— Chu, Nov. 17

In his defense of the Energy Department’s handling of the $535 million loan guarantee to the now bankrupt Solyndra, Energy Secretary Steven Chu made some bold claims about the overall effectiveness of the department’s clean-energy loan programs. He also made the case that the collapse in solar panel prices — which helped sink Solyndra — was “totally unexpected” by most financial analysts at the time when the department went forward with the loan in 2009.

There are a number of issues in dispute concerning Solyndra, but these two statements by Chu appear to be the most ripe for a fact check because they get to the heart of the issue about whether the clean-energy program is creating many jobs and whether the Energy Department should have seen the red flags concerning the Solyndra investment.