by
Brian Mann on July 17th, 2010
On Friday, the Canadian company TDI acknowledged that its American subsidiary will ask for hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and loan guarantees from the US government as part of the Federal stimulus program.
Company CEO Don Jessome said at a hearing in Plattsburgh that credit markets for major projects dried up in the wake of the financial collapse.
“Loans for projects of this size and scale became much more difficult. So it’s certainly an integral part of our go-forward strategy, is to achieve that loan guarantee program.”
TDI’s bid for Federal aid on the project being reviewed now by the Obama administration. Jessome said the fact that his firm is largely Canadian-owned doesn’t disqualify it from applying for stimulus aid.
We’ll have more on this story Monday during the 8 O’clock Hour.
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Wouldn’t it be better to just spend $2 billion putting a photovoltaic cell on every house in Connecticut?
Yeah, it would. But since home power systems depend on people maintaining the systems and altering their power use it’s a non-starter. People, being basically lazy (sorry, but it’s true), aren’t interested in anything that requires more of their time and effort and becomes an inconvenience.
I find it odd that we’re talking about using borrowed money to make loans. Can you imagine the interest payment if banks did things that way?
The simple truth is that we are addicted to having it all by borrowing money, cutting taxes and constantly increasing expectations about what can be done … the “new math”. The simple truth is that there isn’t a simple solution to our mess. Government needs more income, less debt and it needs to lead people to expectations that are aligned with these first two realities.
How about lower expectations and taxes and smaller gov’t? That works for me.
I’d like to hear the specifics as to why “Loans for projects of this size and scale became much more difficult.” For instance do the banks now require more collateral? More down payment on the part of the company? Define “difficult” in other words.
I’m all for upgrading the grid as a means to utilizing more renewable, alternative energies and simply to make it more efficient, but I’m growing very tired of reading that every upgrade or project requires gov’t subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare) to move forward. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it’s a scam on the part of developers and banks to lessen their risk on the backs of tax payers. It’s almost as if they’ve used the financial crisis as an excuse (despite the huge bank bailout) to increase corporate welfare across the board.
And to top it off we have yet another foreign owned entity taking our tax dollars to further enrich themselves. And please show me pay off to the tax payers. Jobs? Cheaper energy for the region? What, exactly?
Clapton- well said and very good questions. This has been the way of things since FDR and the TVA. IIRC there was a time when the alternative view was that each town or area would have it’s own generating capacity, but that got sqaushed by FDR and the New Deal and centralized control, the one big factory Soviet idea.. I forget who all the players were but in retrospect the idea had some real merit.