[jandrese]

The Obama administration tried, but it was too little too late and they were raked over the coals by Republicans for "choosing winners".

But fundamentally solar cell production was (is?) pretty dirty and US environmental regulations were always going to be a stumbling block. One used to be able to spot Chinese solar factories on satellite maps by looking upstream from deadzones, but apparently that has been enough of an embarrassment that even the CCP has started cracking down.

[anonymars]

And choosing "losers", specifically Solyndra was shrieked at along the lines of Benghazi

Basically DOE funded research pretty successfully but it only takes one failure for the loud voices to win

Same program funded Tesla as I recall

Example source: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/exclusive-controver...

[pfdietz]

> But fundamentally solar cell production was (is?) pretty dirty

There's nothing "fundamentally" dirty about it. It's not like fossil fuel combustion that inevitably produces a large stream of waste (CO2).