A leading renewable energy firm, Abengoa SA, which has been the darling of the City of London and Wall Street financiers, and green Malthusians, filed for bankruptcy, on Feb. 23. The Spanish company has carried out projects in the United States, and in 2010, it received a large United States loan guarantee from the Barack Obama-Joe Biden administration to build a solar energy plant in Arizona. Abengoa’s is the second largest bankruptcy in Spanish history, according to El País daily, and has global implications. This represents a snapshot of the significant vulnerability of a planned $40 trillion green speculative bubble in “renewables,” even before it is built.
This will be the third failure of Abengoa; having cooked its books in 2015—it was later found out—in order to present a picture of functionality, it collapsed in 2016 (wiping out almost all the value of its stockholders). It restructured its debt in 2018, and was in the process of attempting to restructure its current €6 billion ($7.3 billion) debt load, when the Spanish regional government of Andalusia unravelled a larger bail-out package by withdrawing its part of the package: an offer of a €20 million loan to the failing Abengoa.
On July 5, 2010, GreenTechMedia reported that in 2008, Abengoa negotiated with the Obama-Biden administration, along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, that the U.S. government would extend to Abengoa Solar a $1.45 billion U.S. federal loan guarantee—a very large sum at that time for renewables—to build a 250 MW Solana solar concentrating power plant near Gila Bend, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, Arizona. It would be a parabolic trough plant that would supposedly be able to store some of the solar rays in the form of thermal energy. But the trick was that the plant would generate about 38% of its rated capacity, meaning that it would generate almost two-thirds less than its rated capacity said.
Abengoa also built in Hugoton, Kansas a hybrid biomass plant, which would convert 350,000 tons of biomass/year into 25 million gallons per year of liquid fuel. Abengoa opened its plant in October 2014; the plant shut down operations in December 2015. Abenoga sold the plant, which cost more than $110 billion to build, to another company for $43 billion.
