Solyndra was one failure in a portfolio of successful projects
Mariana Mazzucato, 2015 - Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London where she is the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. The Entrepreneurial State, p.141-143
Solyndra was not the only company receiving loan guarantees from the DoE to develop clean technologies to go bankrupt. Three others also filed for Chapter 11: Fisker Automotive (filing for bankruptcy in 2013), Abound Solar and Vehicle Production Group (both filing in 2012). Altogether, these four companies defaulted on $780 million in loans, which represents just 2.28 per cent of the $34.2 billion loan guarantees offered by the DoE as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (the loan guarantee programme was intensified with the ARRA of 2009).
This default rate is in itself low, and inferior to the amount already repaid by other companies like Tesla Motors, which by the end of 2014 amounted to $810 million. In fact, the overall DoE loan guarantee programme is expected to earn taxpayers $5-6 billion in 20 years, according to a US government report to which Bloomberg had access at the end of 2014 (Doom 2014). As a market analyst interviewed by Bloomberg emphasized, a $5 billion return exceeds what many venture capital and private equity funds even dream to obtain as a return from their investments in clean energy. And this is the punch line: when seen as standalone investments, public funding to specific companies developing risky and uncertain innovations will be seen as failures if the company goes bankrupt. 'Governments are lousy at picking winners!' critics say. What is important, however, is to look at such 'picking winner' investments as a portfolio of long-term investments. From this perspective, DoE's loan guarantee programme is likely to become a huge success.