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In 2011, solar panel company Solyndra defaulted on a $535 million loan guaranteed by the Department of Energy. The agency had a few other high-profile bankruptcies, too — electric car company Fisker and solar company Abound among them. But now that loan program has started turning a profit.

Overall, the agency has loaned $34.2 billion to a variety of businesses, under a program designed to speed up development of clean-energy technology. Companies have defaulted on $780 million of that — a loss rate of 2.28 percent. The agency also has collected $810 million in interest payments, putting the program $30 million in the black.

When Congress created the loan program under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it was never designed to be a moneymaker. In fact, Congress imagined there would be losses and set aside $10 billion to cover them.

Still, when the Solyndra case emerged, Republicans on Capitol Hill had pointed criticism for the Obama administration. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., called the Solyndra case "disgusting," and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, labeled it "a colossal failure." The conservative group Americans for Prosperity produced a television ad accusing President Obama of paying back campaign contributors.

There was an FBI raid on Solyndra's headquarters and an investigation but, so far, no prosecutions. Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent. They either declined or ignored NPR's requests for comment. And with that, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz wants to change people's perception of his agency's loan program.

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"It literally kick-started the whole utility-scale photovoltaic industry," Moniz says. The program funded the first of five huge solar projects in the West. Moniz says before that, developers couldn't get money from private lenders. But now, with proven business models, they can.

The Energy Department actively monitors all the companies in its portfolio for potential default risks, "and when there are warning flags, then the disbursements are suspended — possibly ended," Moniz says.

But he says the Energy Department doesn't want to go too far in the direction of only lending to safe investments. "We have to be careful that we don't walk away from risk, because otherwise we're not really going to advance the marketplace," he says.

Moniz points to a small company called Beacon Power as an example. It got an Energy Department loan, went bankrupt and defaulted on about $14 million in debt. Today the company is back in business, providing a valuable service to electricity grids and repaying the rest of its loan.

In eastern Pennsylvania, one of Beacon's facilities sits on 4 acres in an industrial park. Underground are 200 black flywheels that each measure 7 feet tall and 3 feet around, and weigh 2,000 pounds. They spin faster when storing energy and slow down when releasing it.

"We're recycling excess energy that's on the power grid and then putting it back into the grid when it's needed," explains President and CEO Barry Brits. He says the flywheels are essentially mechanical batteries.

But unlike the battery in your cellphone, the flywheel doesn't wear out over time. "What's unique about the flywheel is that it really is unlimited in terms of the number of times it can charge and discharge," Brits says.

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Beacon Power's plant in Hazle Township, Pa., stores electricity for brief periods, making it easier for the local power grid to integrate intermittent forms of renewable generation, such as wind and solar. Flywheels located in the blue cylinders store energy and operate like a battery — pulling in power from the grid when there's too much and releasing it back out when there's not enough. Jeff Brady/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Jeff Brady/NPR

Beacon Power's plant in Hazle Township, Pa., stores electricity for brief periods, making it easier for the local power grid to integrate intermittent forms of renewable generation, such as wind and solar. Flywheels located in the blue cylinders store energy and operate like a battery — pulling in power from the grid when there's too much and releasing it back out when there's not enough.

Jeff Brady/NPR

Being able to store electricity is important because wind and solar generators only produce power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. That can make life difficult for grid operators who must balance the amount of electricity produced with how much is used. Storing power — even for brief periods — gives them more flexibility and makes it easier to include intermittent forms of renewable generation on the grid.

Brits says the Department of Energy loan allowed his company to test and then improve its flywheels. "Our technology is now well-proven. We have over 7 million operating hours," he says, adding that building a plant costs half of what it did three years ago.

Despite early missteps, the Department of Energy is ready to invest in more projects that could advance clean energy technology in the U.S. Moniz says his agency has about $40 billion to lend in coming years.

Department of Energy

Solyndra

Americans grow up knowing their colors are red, white and blue. It's right there in the flag, right there in the World Series bunting and on those floats every fourth of July.

So when did we become a nation of red states and blue states? And what do they mean when they say a state is turning purple?

Painting whole states with a broad brush bothers a lot of people, and if you're one of them you may want to blame the media. We've been using these designations rather vigorously for the last half-dozen election cycles or so as a quick way to describe the vote in given state in a given election, or its partisan tendencies over a longer period.

It got started on TV, the original electronic visual, when NBC, the first all-color network, unveiled an illuminated map — snazzy for its time — in 1976. John Chancellor was the NBC election night anchor who explained how states were going to be blue if they voted for incumbent Republican Gerald Ford, red if they voted for Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter.

That arrangement was consistent with the habit of many texts and reference books, which tended to use blue for Republicans in part because blue was the color of the Union in the Civil War. Blue is also typically associated with the more conservative parties in Europe and elsewhere.

As the other TV operations went to full color, they too added vivid maps to their election night extravaganzas. But they didn't agree on a color scheme, so viewers switching between channels might see Ronald Reagan's landslide turning the landscape blue on NBC and CBS but red on ABC.

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The confusion persisted until 2000, when the coloring of states for one party of the other dragged on well past election night. As people were more interested in the red-blue maps than ever, the need for consistency across media outlets became paramount. And as the conversation about the disputed election continued, referring to states that voted for George W. Bush as "red states" rather than "Republican states" (and those voting for Democrat Al Gore as "blue states") seemed increasingly natural.

And it never went away. Instead, it became a staple of political discourse, not just in the media but in academic circles and popular conversation as well.

By the next presidential election, the red-blue language was so common as to be a metaphor for partisanship. That provided a convenient target for the most memorable speech of that election cycle, the 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, delivered by a young senatorial candidate from Illinois named Barack Obama.

"The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states," he said. "Red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too — we worship an awesome God in the blue states and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states."

Of course, that did not stop "the pundits" or anyone else from using these catchy labels. If anything, the practice has become more universal.

Not a few Americans see this as a symptom of a real disease in the body politic, an imbalance in favor of conflict that makes compromise more difficult.

Painting whole states with an ideologically broad brush is also offensive to many. No liberal in Idaho needs to be told that state leans conservative, just as conservatives in Minnesota are fully aware theirs was the only state not tinted for Ronald Reagan in 1984.

But being on the minor-fraction side of the party balance does not make these citizens less Idahoan or less Minnesotan. On the contrary, they may be among the fiercest loyalists of either state.

#ColorFacts: A Weird Little Lesson In Rainbow Order hide caption

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No one thinks the red or blue designation makes a state politically single-minded. But the message sent by such media-driven characterizations is not without consequence.

Bill Bishop, the Texas-based writer who co-authored the influential book The Big Sort in 2004, says political affiliation is a powerful part of the allure certain communities have for Americans seeking a compatible home.

"All of this is a shorthand, right? So a 'blue community' is a shorthand not only for politics but for a way of life ..." says Bishop.

And for many people, that way of life includes a sorting out by political affinity.

"We thought at first that this was all lifestyle, but the more I talked to people, the more I talked to people who said it was a conscious decision to go to a Democratic area or a Republican area."

Which may mean the red and blue labels will be even harder for the media to resist using in the years ahead.

Suzan Harjo

Suzan Shown Harjo, who is Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, has long been an advocate for Native American rights.

Before she petitioned the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office to cancel the federal trademark registrations for the Washington Redskins, she had already successfully stopped other sports teams from using names and mascots demeaning to Native American cultures.

She worked with Native American activist groups to get the University of Oklahoma to retire its mascot "Little Red" in 1970. Soon after, and with pressure from Harjo and these groups, Dartmouth University retired the "Indian" as its unofficial mascot. In the mid-1990s, Harjo convinced the Kentucky Department of Education and schools to change all the schools with Native American stereotypes in their names, or mascots.

In the 1960s, Harjo co-produced Seeing Red, the U.S.'s first Native American news program at New York's WBAI radio station. There she met her husband Frank Harjo, with whom she reported on New York's vibrant Native American community. Her involvement in the local art scene is what initially sparked her interest in work advocating for the repatriation of sacred Native cultural objects held by museums. In 1974, Harjo began working as a legislative liaison representing Native American rights in addition to serving as the news director of the American Indian Press Association.

Under President Jimmy Carter, Harjo served as a Congressional liaison for Indian affairs and supported Native American positions in the formation of federal policy. In this role, she worked toward the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which was intended to protect the traditional religious and cultural practices of Native Americans, Alaskans and Hawaiians.

She helped found the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and served as a founding trustee in the 1990s. Harjo was also the guest curator and general editor for a 2014 exhibition and book at the museum about treaties between the United States and Native American nations. Currently, Harjo serves as the President of the Morning Star Institute, a national Native American advocacy organization.

Patsy Mink

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Rep. Patsy Mink, D-Hawaii, meets reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday in 1997 the Senate Judiciary Committee to support Bill Lann Lee's nomination to head the Justice Department's civil rights division. JOE MARQUETTE/ASSOCIATED PRESS hide caption

itoggle caption JOE MARQUETTE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Rep. Patsy Mink, D-Hawaii, meets reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday in 1997 the Senate Judiciary Committee to support Bill Lann Lee's nomination to head the Justice Department's civil rights division.

JOE MARQUETTE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Patsy Mink (ne Takemoto) was born 1927 to Mitama Tateyama and Suematsu Takemoto, second-generation Japanese-Americans living in Maui, Hawaii. Her grandparents had immigrated to the United States at the turn of the century in search of opportunity and found work in Hawaii's sugar cane plantations. Her family's pursuit of the American Dream butt up against intense xenophobia in the years following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, and those experiences deeply affected her ideas of what it meant to be an American.

Maui's racially-stratified plantation economy would come to inform Mink's own politics for the rest of her life. Early in her career, Mink aligned herself with Hawaii's Democratic minority in opposition to the historically Republican establishment.

Long before she became a lawmaker, Mink planned to practice medicine. According to the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, she was rejected from the 20 medical schools that she applied to on the basis of her gender. Undeterred in her resolve to make a difference, Mink worked a number of menial jobs before an employer recommended that she apply to law school.

Mink believed that the University of Chicago Law School admitted her in 1948 due to a clerical error that misidentified her as a foreign student. After graduating with her J.D. in 1951, Mink still found virtually no career prospects open to her as a female, Japanese-American lawyer.

She moved back to Hawaii with her husband and daughter. With a loan from her father, Mink founded her own practice where she specialized in criminal and family law. In addition to being the first Japanese-American female lawyer in the state and teaching at the University of Hawaii law school, Mink also became involved in politics there.

Mink would eventually win a seat as Hawaii's Democratic senator and become a prominent Asian-American voice in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, joining the NAACP in 1960s. In 1972 she threw her hat into the ring and became the first Asian American to run for the United States presidency campaigning on an anti-war platform.

Though Mink did not ultimately secure the Democratic Party's nomination, she cemented her legacy as a legislator that same year when she co-sponsored Title IX of of the United States Education Amendments. Title IX forever changed the way institutions of higher education welcomed women.

Two years later, she introduced the Women's Educational Equity Act, which was signed into law by President Gerald Ford and outlines federal protections against gender discrimination of women in schools. After Mink returned to Congress in 1990, Mink co-sponsored a bill intended to combat gender bias in grade school, and, in 1995, organized and led the Democratic Women's Caucus.

Mink served in the House until her death in September 2002.

Edward Roybal

Edward Roybal was known for his advocacy on the issue of creating services for the U.S.'s aging population as well as championing civil rights. The USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging hide caption

itoggle caption The USC Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging

Edward Roybal was a groundbreaking politician who became a role model for a generation of Latino elected officials. He served as the founding chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and was one of first Hispanic lawmakers to hold national office in the 20th century. In the 1970s, Roybal also co-founded the National Association Latino Elected Leaders and Appointed Officials (NALEO) to help more Latinos carry out successful bids for public office.

Roybal began his political career in 1949, serving on the Los Angeles City Council, an experience he recounted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. At his first meeting, Roybal balked when a colleague introduced him as "our new Mexican-speaking councilman, representing the Mexican people in his district." Discarding his prepared remarks, Roybal responded by explaining that he was not Mexican, but Mexican American; and did not speak "Mexican," but Spanish.

During his time on the council, Roybal worked with local political organizations to launch voter registration drives and efforts to stop police brutality. Roybal left the council for the halls of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, where he would serve for the next 30 years. As a representative from Los Angeles, Roybal supported measures that restored cuts to senior citizens' healthcare programs, funded AIDS research in the early 1980s, and created bilingual education programs.

Roybal's congressional career wasn't always smooth. In 1978, he was targeted by the House Ethics Committee for failing to report a political contribution. He received a reprimand after several House colleagues and Latino leaders from around the country came to his defense.

Roybal ended his career in Congress in 1993. Within California's political circles, he became known as "The Old Man," whose endorsement could play a decisive role for political victories. His daughter, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, began serving in Congress in 1993 and currently represents California's 40th District.

Roybal was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001 by then-President Clinton. He died in 2005, at age 89.

Last week, you may have heard, the Democrats took a historic drubbing in the midterm elections for Congress. They lost their majority in the Senate and saw their numbers in the House fall to their lowest point in nearly seven decades.

Yet they could hardly wait to get back to Washington and reelect the party's leaders in both chambers — unopposed.

The 2014 election may have been mainly a referendum on the president, but two other names were mentioned almost as often in Republican ads: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Republican candidates everywhere ran against those two leaders more than they ran against their actual opponents.

Yet Reid already has been swept back into his party's top spot, and Pelosi will follow next week — and in neither case was there so much as a struggle.

To some degree, this reflects the attitude in the Democratic cloakroom that these two longtime symbols of the party have served the cause well, and are not to blame for the deluge on Election Day. To this way of thinking, ousting Reid or Pelosi would be scapegoating.

But surely there are other Democrats in both chambers who see these two names as being more useful as targets for the enemy than they are valuable as inspirational figures. They rouse the opposition far more effectively than they rally the faithful.

Yet not one member in either chamber has been willing to step forward as a challenger to either Democratic leader. And without such a challenge, the leader simply wins again — either party, either chamber, every time.

Congress has reached historic lows in approval, and despite the election results, that disapproval applies to Republicans, too.

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, who began 2014 with the lowest home-state approval ratings of any senator seeking re-election, has just become the new majority leader in the Senate for 2015. He is the toast of Washington.

That, in its way, is as curious as the re-election of Reid and Pelosi. If this is democracy at work, its works are strange indeed.

But then, it is not exactly democracy that is operating: It's the internal rules of the party conferences in Congress. Those rules make it all but impossible for an incumbent leader to be dislodged.

The difficulty of mounting a challenge — and of gaining the needed commitments from colleagues in secrecy — is matched only by the risk of doing so and failing. Ask the last person who challenged a Speaker or any other party leader.

Or perhaps you don't remember what became of Heath Schuler, former member of Congress.

And so, whatever the voters may say, the leaders march on.

There is an alternative to this that is readily available. The party caucuses could hold a vote of confidence (often called a vote of "no confidence") in the leader by secret ballot after each congressional election. Individuals could vote to remove the leader while remaining anonymous, and the question of succession would be taken up separately as required.

Would it be pretty? Perhaps not. But with such an arrangement you would gain at least the possibility that the party leader might yield to a fresher face with a cleaner slate. And if such a fate were more plausible than it is now, shaky leaders would be more likely to step aside voluntarily when circumstances dictated.

Alternatively, if the vote of confidence was positive, the party leader could begin anew in the next Congress knowing that he or she really had the bona fide support of his troops. That would be far better than the default endorsement that comes with winning a no-contest reelection.

There would, of course, be no guarantee a new leader would be better, but a new leader would be new. In an office of largely symbolic importance, mere newness can be a cardinal virtue.

The "no confidence" vote is a feature of parliamentary systems the world over, and it serves an obviously useful purpose. That purpose is not limited to the majority or the minority leader, nor would it require as devastating an election loss as the Democrats just had.

Doubtless there are those in both parties and chambers who agree such a mechanism would be useful — but the same old survival instincts and cost-benefit ratios still apply, and the math always looks pretty much the same. So we shouldn't expect to hear the idea of a "no confidence" vote being endorsed in any floor speeches next week, when Congress returns for its lame duck session.

House leadership

Harry Reid

Democratic Party

Congress

Nancy Pelosi