The U.S. DOE loan program has a 97% success rate.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
Judge as of 2014-01-14. Measure 'success rate' as the share of the DOE Loan Programs Office portfolio (by loan dollars, or by the share of losses relative to the portfolio) that was not in default or loss. True: official or independent figures from around that date show losses or defaults of about 3% or less, so about 97% performing (within about ±1 percentage point). Mostly true: the figure is about 95–96% or 98–99%, or 97% holds by dollars but not by number of projects, if the claim's basis is unspecified. Mixed: about 90–94%. Mostly false: the 97% figure was cited by DOE but is clearly wrong on reasonable measures, or is substantially below. False: losses were well above 10% of the portfolio.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 Critics question 'green loans,' but US points to the numbers CNBC · 14 September 2013
“only represent about 2 percent of our overall loan program portfolio of approximately $34 billion, and less than 10 percent of the loan loss reserve Congress set aside for the program.”
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E2 Presentation - Department of Energy U.S. Department of Energy, Loan Programs Office · 2013
“Estimated losses to date on a $34.4 billion portfolio are about 2%”
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E3 [PDF] This is a preliminary, unedited transcript. The statements within ... U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations · 30 May 2014
“of the 30 billion portfolio outstanding, 98 percent of that portfolio is performing and paying back.”
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E4 [PDF] This is a preliminary, unedited transcript. The statements within ... U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations · 30 May 2014
“Private-sector clean energy projects supported by the loan guarantee program have an 87 percent success rate, far outpacing the performance of typical venture capital firms.”
Reasoning
Close to the claim date, DOE figures put estimated losses at about 2% of a roughly $34 billion portfolio (E1, E2). A May 2014 hearing transcript says 98% of the $30 billion outstanding portfolio was performing (E3). By loan dollars, that is about 98% performing, within about one point of the claimed 97%. The same transcript also gives an 87% success rate for private-sector clean energy projects (E4), which suggests a lower figure on another measure, possibly by project count. Because the claim does not say which measure it uses, this gives a mostly_true verdict rather than true.
Cite this claim
Vinod Khosla, “The U.S. DOE loan program has a 97% success rate.” (said 14 January 2014). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_c3943da03c43, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_c3943da03c43
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
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