Where Our $500 Million Went: Solyndra Glass Tubes Used as Modern Art

The missing Solyndra tubes have finally turned up — in a modern art exhibit at U.C. Berkeley:

One of the great mysteries of the 2011 Solyndra bankruptcy was: What happened to all that money? After the United States government “loaned” Solyndra $535 million, the money quickly vanished; the bankruptcy court later found that the company had essentially no cash on hand. They had spent it all on equipment and inventory.

Surely, then, the inventory could be sold and liquidated, to recover some of the ill-spent cash — right? Well, not really. Auctions of the material at the shuttered Solyndra factory produced very little revenue, as the highly specialized machinery and proprietary photovoltaic components spurred little interest among the auction vultures, since the parts could be used only for one specific purpose: to make Solyndra’s unique tubular solar panels.

The fate of Solyndra’s millions of unused glass tubes is still unknown (many of them were likely destroyed — we’ll get to that part of the story in a moment), but luckily a pair of Bay Area artists somehow managed to get their hands on some of the surviving Solyndra tubes and put them to good use…not to produce electricity, but as art.

Go read the rest.