The stimulus bill was supposed to put Americans back to work. Turns out that eight out of every ten dollars in wind energy grants has gone to foreign firms. According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop:
Money from the 2009 stimulus bill to help support the renewable energy industry continues to flow overseas, despite Congressional criticism and calls for change, according to a new analysis of the program by the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
The Workshop was the first to report last October that more than 80 percent of the first $1 billion in grants to wind energy companies went to foreign firms. Since then, the administration has stopped making announcements of new grants to wind, solar and geothermal companies, but has handed out another $1 billion, bringing the total given out to $2.1 billion and the total that went to companies based overseas to more than 79 percent.
In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company that built a Texas wind farm using turbines made by a Japanese company.
This would seem to be a curious way to put Americans back to work. I guess it’s yet another example of change that we can’t believe in.