Must be nice to deal with the Federal government after kicking in a few coins to the right peeps. From the New York Times:
A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search
Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes.
The project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.
The government support -- which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates -- largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG -- even Google.
A great deal of attention has been focused on Solyndra, a start-up that received $528 million in federal loans to develop cutting-edge solar technology before it went bankrupt, but nearly 90 percent of the $16 billion in clean-energy loans guaranteed by the federal government since 2009 went to subsidize these lower-risk power plants, which in many cases were backed by big companies with vast resources.
And from the Los Angeles Times:
Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal
Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.
Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.
When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company's financial demands, senior officials replaced the government's lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.
When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.
Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a "sole-source" procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government's specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.
Our tax dollars at work... Interesting to note that Siga is in a bit of legal hot-water over this drug:
SIGA Technologies crashes; Obligated to share ST-246 profits with PharmAthene
Here is a big story between warring companies in a very substantial court ruling in PharmAthene's favor. PIP filed the lawsuit against SIGA Technologies Inc. in December 2006, citing PIP's interest in ST-246, an orally available smallpox antiviral drug candidate.
SIGA, a company specializing in the development of pharmaceutical agents to fight biowarfare pathogens, today announced that the Delaware Court of Chancery has issued its post-trial opinion in the litigation commenced by PIP in 2006. The Court denied PIP's contention that a draft license term sheet attached to the parties' 2006 merger agreement was a binding license and denied the company's request for specific performance of the alleged license.
However, the Court ruled in PIP's favor on its claims for promissory estoppel and breach of the duty to negotiate a license agreement. The Court, after acknowledging that PIP did not establish a right to any traditional form of relief on these claims, awarded to PIP an 'equitable payment stream' consisting of 50% of the net profits that SIGA achieves from the next ten years of sales of ST-246, its smallpox drug, after the first $40 million of net profits goes entirely to SIGA.
SIGA's stock price has tanked from around $14 in June to just under $3 today...
