FuelFix Digs In On Romney's Green Energy Claim

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

October 5, 2012 | 12:29 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

Mitt Romney campaigns in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania

A bit more from FuelFix on Governor Romney’s claim that half of the green energy companies benefiting from federal grants, loan guarantees or other perks have gone out of business:

Since Solyndra’s bankruptcy, most Republican criticism of the Obama’s green-jobs spending has focused on the loan programs run by the Department of Energy, programs that awarded $34.5 billion in loans. Here’s the list of companies and projects that received those loans:
There are 33 projects. By my count, three of the companies behind those projects have gone bankrupt — Abound Solar, Beacon Power, and Solyndra.
Definitely not half.
Now, the success of many of the companies that received funding is far from guaranteed. And one can easily question whether taxpayers got their money’s worth on all of the green stimulus spending. For example, California received $146 million in stimulus funding for a program to make homes more energy efficient. So far, the program has only served 5,130 homes. Not a lot of bang for the buck.
But the wave of bankruptcies that Romney’s comments suggest? It hasn’t happened.