I, panel: Solyndra's story, with apologies to Leonard E. Read.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I AM A SOLAR panel--not the ordinary flat solar panel familiar to all boys and girls and adults who hope for greener energy sources. I'm actually much more sophisticated and much less useful than those. I'm a cylindrical-tube panel manufactured by Fremont, California-based Solyndra LLC.

According to my creators, I offer a unique advantage over the traditional solar panel--I don't need to be repositioned throughout the day to absorb maximum sunlight. Solyndra says that I "capture sunlight across a 360-degree photovoltaic surface capable of converting direct, diffuse and reflected sunlight into electricity."

After the Department of Energy gave Solyndra a taxpayer guaranteed loan of more than half a billion dollars, the company failed. It turned out my tubular components were just too visionary and ingenious for the rough and tumble of a competitive energy market--even with big support from taxpayers.

In September Solyndra went bankrupt, and the failure sparked a long-suppressed mainstream media discussion about the viability of green energy businesses that have to be supported by taxpayers. But government funding of green energy remains popular. Late in that month, 62 percent of poll respondents told Public Opinion Strategies they agreed that "the failure of one California company should not stop us from continuing to make targeted public investments to help create American clean energy jobs" you may wonder why I should rite my story. Well, unlike another object--a pencil, say--I am not an example of how the free market creates an elegantly simple product for everybody, whose creation results from the spontaneously organized self-interest of countless people who have never met each other.

Rather, my genealogy demonstrates how a market directed by Washington, D.C., created a needlessly fancy object, whose creation required the politically organized self-interest of a small handful of people; all of whom--from President Barack Obama, to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, to billionaire Obama donor/bundler George Kaiser (whose investment vehicles Argonaut Ventures I L.L.C. and GKFF Investment Company both had large positions in Solyndra and were represented on its board of directors), to company founder Chris Gronet (who visited the White House in 2009 and hosted the president for a photo op at Solyndra headquarters in 2010)--seem to have known each other too well.

The fall of Solyndra, and its cascading subplots, caused a...