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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SmoothSail who wrote (464988)	1/13/2012 11:12:51 PM
From: Sr K	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793830

Oblivious passed along an email that's been discredited, and it's a month old. Why is it being reported now, other than she got it today or yesterday? Here's part of the response on snopes.com. In the original some portions are indented. The claim that the aforementioned loan guarantee is "costing us $16 million per job" is spurious for two reasons. First off, although the project is eventually expected to result in 45 permanent jobs, it is also expected to create several hundred construction jobs in the near-term in addition to thousands of other related jobs: "We expect to create more than 600 direct jobs on the project site over the 30 month construction period, and more than 4,300 direct, indirect and induced jobs at companies throughout the U.S. that provide engineering, equipment supply and manufacturing, transportation and other value-added services. Orders and activities are already proceeding in more than twenty states across the country," Kevin Smith, [CEO of SolarReserve] said. Second, the dollar figure mentioned is a loan guarantee, so the project isn't going to be "costing us" (i.e., the taxpayers) $737 million save for the highly unlikely circumstance that SolarReserve defaults on the entire loan amount, forcing the DOE to cover the shortfall. If SolarReserve pays back the loan as expected, the added jobs won't have cost us anything. (SolarReserve announced in December 2009 that it had already signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with NV Energy for the sale of electricity from the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.) It is true that one of SolarReserve's investors is Pacific Corporate Group (PCG), a private equity firm which has employed Ronald Pelosi (the brother-in-law of U.S. Representative and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) as an executive since April 2011. However, PCG's investment in SolarReserve is a minuscule 2 percent share, the investment and the DOE loan guarantee process for SolarReserve were both initiated years before Ronald Pelosi joined the firm, and Pelosi had no personal financial stake in the outcome: Ronald Pelosi joined Pacific Corporate Group in April, roughly three years after it had invested in SolarReserve, a company official confirmed. The official said Ronald Pelosi doesn't stand to profit or lose from the firm's stake in SolarReserve because he doesn't have an interest in the fund that made that investment. www.snopes.com/politics/business/tonopahsolar.asp