Has it really only been half a year since Solyndra suspended operations?
At one time, Solyndra was soaring above the rooftops, a green energy darling making thin film solar photovoltaic power systems for large commercial and industrial rooftops. "Clever product!" analysts and investors said. "Big potential market!" "Who doesn't love Fremont?" OK, that last thought was mostly expressed by people in the Bay Area, but the excitement was genuine.
Then the price of Chinese solar panels dropped, and Solyndra's fortunes faded fast. (There's more on this rise and fall at the California Report's old blog Shifting Gears.)
After the collapse, new questions cropped up. Solyndra got a $535 million loan guarantee from the Energy Department. It was the first loan guarantee of a kind authorized by a bill President George W. Bush signed into law in 2005. Did Solyndra mislead the Department of Energy about its financial health?
Although today's report doesn't touch on the political maelstrom that followed, Fortune assesses it rather economically in its write-up about the report:
Vice President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Chu presided at the groundbreaking of Solyndra's Fab 2 facility in Fremont, California, in a photo opp that they would come to rue. In his remarks, Biden laid the credit for the loan guarantee and construction launch squarely on the Obama Administration's 200-day-old Recovery Act legislation, downplaying the role of the 2005 legislation and the nearly two-and-a-half-year process that had actually led up to this moment. Thus, Biden unwittingly inflated a political football that would soon grow to the size of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float.
A flock of investigators swarmed into Fremont. They came from the FBI, the Department of Energy Office of Inspector General, the regional US Attorney's office...even Congress.