I could scarcely believe my eyes when I read in David A. Keene's excellent article on Obama's green follies:

 Mr. Chu's spokesman argued that "the project that we supported succeeded. The facility was producing the product it said it would produce, and consumers were buying the product."

But then I thought about Secretary Steven Chu's background as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Berkeley.  He regarded Solyndra as some kind of experiment, to prove that the process was viable (in the sense of physically possible).   

The entire question of how much it cost apparently was irrelevant to him.   This is a powerful argument for keeping academics out of policy positions. Academics have a tendency to fall in love with their analytical frameworks, and find it hard to broaden their horizons in response to lessons from reality.