What should taxpayers do with Solyndra's now empty fancy building?

[Liberal_in_LA]

Solyndra's multimillion-dollar white elephant

The lavish Solyndra plant sits empty at its Fremont site along Interstate 880. The company spent millions in federal money to build the factory.

The glass-and-metal building that Solyndra LLC began erecting alongside Interstate 880 in Fremont in September 2009 was something the Silicon Valley area hadn't seen in years: a new factory.

It wasn't just any factory. When it was completed at an estimated cost of $733 million, including proceeds from a $528 million federal 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, a San Jose resident who worked as a facilities manager at Solyndra, said.

The building, designed to make far more solar panels than Solyndra got orders for, is now shuttered, and taxpayers may be stuck with it. Solyndra filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 5, leaving in its wake investigations by Congress and the FBI and a Republican-fueled political embarrassment for the Obama administration, which issued the loan guarantee. About 1,100 workers lost their jobs.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/28/BURG1LAO3J.DTL#ixzz1ZNCOFin2

[kestrel91316]

1. In a pinch I am sure there are a few homeless folks who could use a

roof over their heads.

[RC]

2. Well that didn't work. Let's try wind now. If that goes bust, maybe

geothermal - the real geo, not this fake shit to jack up the price of heat/AC by calling it something it is not.
Eventually something is bound to work, correct?

Maybe if we tried to get our Living Wage Jobs back into this country first so these new businesses would have some customers that could afford by buy this new techie stuff. Ya think?

[EmeraldCityGrl]

3. Turn it into an innovation center.

a place where people with unique ideas for using solar power can congregate, invent, study, experiment and learn.

[SlimJimmy]

5. That's a good idea, since the previous owners sure as hell didn't.

[Starry Messenger]

4. This story makes me ill.