Navy Launches Massive Solar Power project

The Navy is pushing ahead on a massive solar power project designed to lower its long-term energy costs, a gigantic 13.8 megawatt solar power installation at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California as part of a broad strategic program to transition U.S. military facilities out of dependence on both domestic and foreign sources of oil.

Power purchase agreements are becoming a routine way to finance solar installations with no money down. The property owner pays only for the electricity used on site, at a lower rate than conventional energy. In some cases the solar power installer, or its partners, can generate additional income by selling excess electricity back to the grid.

The Navy expects to save about $13 million over the 20-year life of the contract, significantly more than it would save on a standard ten-year contract.

But the company its chosen to partner with has come under the crosshairs of conservatives online and Republicans in Congress.

SunPower Corp. was branded Solyndra 2.0 by conservative writers in the Fall of 2011, based on the facts that the company received a $1.2 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy for a project in California, had debt totaling 80 percent of its market value, and that the company was represented by the son of Rep. George Miller (D-CA), who writers admitted had no proven connection to the Energy Department’s decision to grant the loan guarantee.

This was around the same time that Republican-led hearings into Solyndra failed to reveal evidence of political favoritism or other misdoings over Solyndra's $535 million federal loan guarantee, so the conservative media was looking around for other examples of Obama's green jobs initiative gone awry.

However, the SunPower issue gained even less traction than Solyndra — no hearings were held into SunPower specifically, although the team at Fox News was up in arms about it — and it appears to have dropped from the conservative radar, at least for now.