Taxpayers will lose $5.17 million invested in this Camp Pendleton solar energy installation

Navy Loses Shirt on Solar Project at Camp Pendleton
By Matt Potter
Published Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2011



A Pentagon audit says taxpayers will lose $5.17 million invested in this Camp Pendleton solar energy installation.

An audit by the Pentagon’s inspector general has found that the Navy, in a hurry to spend funds appropriated by Congress in February 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commissioned a series of expensive and wasteful solar energy projects, including one at Camp Pendleton. “During project planning and selection, officials did not consider whether projects were cost-effective or analyze different types of energy projects to determine the best investments for meeting legislative energy goals,” according to the September 22 report. “Instead, they relied upon project titles, location, cost, and amount of time to award contracts to select projects.”

The audit goes on to say that “Officials also were not well equipped to handle quick timelines for planning and selecting projects because, at the time of the Recovery Act’s implementation, the Navy and Marine Corps did not have processes for completing life-cycle cost analyses, processes for planning and selecting all energy projects, or energy strategies for achieving legislative goals.” The bottom line: investigators concluded that the government “will not recover $25.1 million of the $50.8 million invested” in the three projects reviewed by the audit.
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