Remember Solyndra, the solar-panel maker that received a more than $500 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy only to eventually go belly-up and leave taxpayers on the hook for at least several hundreds of millions of dollars? …That was so 21012, Democrats might sputter angrily, and Republicans should really just get over it already and stop making such a hysterical fuss over such a trifling amount lost only in the name of an unquestionably noble cause.

Hmm. That might be passable advice, I suppose, if Solyndra had been a one-off instance of the federal government awarding generous subsidies to the renewable “investment” projects of their ideologically- and not market-driven preference, except that the continually steady stream of now failed ventures that have been victims recipients of the Obama administration’s largesse rather belie that dismissal.

The latest from just this week, via Reuters:

Ecotality Inc, a maker of charging stations for electric cars that won a $99.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy four years ago, has filed for bankruptcy protection and said it plans to auction its assets next month.

The San Francisco-based company is among a growing number of U.S. alternative-energy companies that have struggled or succumbed amid consumer resistance to the high cost and restricted driving range associated with electric vehicles.

Ecotality and five affiliates filed for Chapter 11 protection on Monday night with the U.S. bankruptcy court in Phoenix. …

According to a court filing, the Energy Department is owed $6.5 million as the largest unsecured creditor of Ecotality affiliate Electric Transportation Engineering Corp.

Ecotality received their almost $100 million grant in 2009, the Obama administration and their cronies assured us that it was all a part of their master plan to help set up a network of charging stations for electric vehicles in major cities across the United States. How that failed to work out, I can’t imagine.

But don’t you think for one moment that Obama’s Department of Energy feels any kind of obligation to more carefully steward taxpayers’ money. They’re going to keep awarding loans and grants and subsidies whenever they damn well please — and to whomever they please, too. Ahem, via Lachlan Markey at the WFB:

The Department of Energy recently awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a green energy company financed by a major Democratic Party fundraiser and supporter of President Barack Obama.

The $4,000,000 award for biofuel company LanzaTech came just months after one of its chief financiers and public advocates hosted the president at his Portola Valley home for a $32,400-a-head fundraiser for the Democratic Party.

The fundraiser took place in June. DOE announced the award for New Zealand-based LanzaTech, designed to support a gas fermentation system developed by the company, on Thursday.