Nick Giacoumakis of the New England Investment and Retirement Group shares why he continues to trust solar investments and talks about the United States Department of Justice’s Joint Business Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.
The Trump administration plans to recover $ 200 million from a Nevada solar project, which received a loan guarantee from the Obama administration, but ultimately failed.
The Department of Energy announced that it had reached the agreement after exhausting options to get the project back on track. According to the Las Vegas Journal Review, the Crescent Dunes solar power plant had been closed since April 2019 and never made a profit.
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“This project has consistently faced technical flaws that have been difficult to overcome,” Shaylyn Hynes, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The Department’s decision was made after years of exhausting the options within our authority to get the project back on track, given the significant taxpayer investment that the previous administration committed to this project.”
The $ 1 billion solar project had been approved by the Obama administration for a $ 737 million Loan Guarantee Agreement in 2011. The Department of Energy said the plant began operating in 2015, but faced technological problems and a series of outages that forced multiple shutdowns and failed to meet power generation requirements.
The Crescent Dunes complex was unique, according to the Journal Review. The plant used more than 10,000 mirrored heliostats, each with the square footage of a small house, to focus sunlight on a central tower and heat the molten salt indoors to more than 1,000 degrees. That salt was used to boil water, producing steam to power generators.
But a Bloomberg News investigation found that by the time the plant opened in 2015, its technology had become obsolete.
The Department of Energy said it was owed $ 424.7 million and settled for $ 200 million. However, that settlement has yet to be approved by a bankruptcy court.
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“President Trump will always support America’s hard-working taxpayers, and today’s massive $ 200 million settlement by the Department of Energy secures taxpayer money that was squandered by failed energy projects of previous administrations “A senior administration official told Fox News.
The administration rejected claims that the project was being abandoned because it does not believe in renewable energy. Trump has called solar energy “wonderful,” but that it “is not strong enough and is very, very expensive.”
The Department of Energy noted that solar generation has increased 110 percent in three years and the department has awarded $ 741 million to solar energy projects under President Trump.
