"The new building is like the Taj Mahal": Some nauseating details on just one of many insane ways that the Obama/Chu braintrust blew your money in an attempt to prevent CO2-induced bad weather

Solyndra’s $733 Million Plant Had Whistling Robots, Spa Showers - Bloomberg

It wasn’t just any factory. When it was completed at an estimated cost of $733 million, including proceeds from a $535 million U.S. loan guarantee, it covered 300,000 square feet, the equivalent of five football fields. It had robots that whistled Disney tunes, spa-like showers with liquid-crystal displays of the water temperature, and glass-walled conference rooms.

“The new building is like the Taj Mahal,” John Pierce, 54, a San Jose resident who worked as a facilities manager at Solyndra, said in an interview.
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Amid the still-unfolding postmortems, the factory stands as emblematic of money misspent and the Field of Dreams ethos that seemed to drive the venture, said Ramesh Misra, a solar-industry analyst in Los Angeles for Brigantine Advisors.
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He is skeptical of the company’s statement, in a press release on the groundbreaking for the plant, that it had a backlog of $2 billion in orders for its cylindrical solar modules for commercial rooftops, which it touted as cheaper to install and more efficient than competing flat panels. “Backlog” is a term sometimes used loosely in the industry and may not represent firm orders at all, he said.
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U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger attended the 2009 groundbreaking for the plant.
...The project employed more than 3,000 union construction workers, according to a Solyndra background sheet.
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The plant features 19 loading docks, four electric car charging stations in the parking lot and landscaping of wild grass and a rock garden.
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Commercial real-estate agents in the region wondered why a new factory was being built in the Silicon Valley region, the epicenter of some of the priciest real estate in the country, where most new construction consists of office space.
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About 11.4 percent, or 950,801 square feet, of industrial space was vacant in Fremont in September 2009, according to data from Colliers.

Obama admin approves 2 solar loans worth $1B

The loans were approved under the same program that paid for a $528 million loan to Solyndra Inc