Green Energy Cronies Scam Taxpayers Out Of Billions Of Dollars

“Canoo, the electric vehicle startup that was promised $100 million in incentives, files for bankruptcy,” read the headline from The Oklahoman in mid-January, angering Oklahoma taxpayers opposed to both tax subsidies and the “green energy” agenda.

It’s one more of the many green energy scams draining the pocketbooks of taxpayers across the nation — think Solyndra and its $570 million bailout.

Canoo began its public-private partnership with Oklahoma in 2021with the state Commerce Department declaring the deal “historic” and Gov. Kevin Stitt gushing about how “thrilled” he was that Oklahoma would become “an innovation leader in electric vehicle technology.” Of course, Canoo CEO Tony Aquila congratulated Stitt for successfully wooing their promised 2,000 jobs to the state.

But by April of 2023, Canoo had yet to start construction on its promised plant in Pryor, Oklahoma, and hadn’t finalized plans for an Oklahoma City plant either, causing Oklahoma’s Commerce Department to pull at least one incentive deal and amend others. Yet, after Canoo promised to buy a factory site in Oklahoma City, its city council voted to give it $1 million in incentives for job creation, though Canoo’s job creation promise had now shrunk to 1,300.

Canoo Begins To Sink

In August of 2023, Canoo agreed to a $1.5 million settlement of a lawsuit in which the Securities and Exchange Commission accused it of “material misstatements in documents filed with the SEC and sent to investors.” Local news media also published Canoo’s 2023 SEC filings showing nearly $800 million in losses over the past several years. Canoo CEO Aquila was reportedly being paid more in reimbursements for his private jet than Canoo was posting in earnings for several years.

Yet months later, Oklahoma paid Canoo $119,850 for three electric Lifestyle Delivery Vehicles (LDVs), which were assigned to the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Corrections and had signed a no-bid contract to buy up to 1,000 vehicles over five years.

Gov. Stitt praised the Office of Management and Enterprise Services for “working hard to deliver taxpayers more for their money while finding ambitious new ways to improve our fleet” and Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnel said, “Beyond innovation, Canoo is creating over 1,300 jobs in Oklahoma, marking a significant economic impact for the state.”

A Canoo press release from March 2024 announced “Canoo’s Oklahoma City Manufacturing Facility Approved as Foreign Trade Zone” and that this “facility currently employs more than 100 workers and will support as many as 1,100 good-paying manufacturing jobs at full capacity.”

Canoo’s 2024 third quarter results looked dismal, however, and a December Canoo press release announced, “the company has furloughed 82 employees, both salaried and hourly, and idling its factories in Oklahoma while it works to finalize securing the capital necessary to move forward with its operations.”

Two of the three state agencies using Canoo vehicles were seeing “limited use” for the vehicles because of lack of accessible charging stations, and Canoo’s labor furloughs brought the number of employees below the threshold necessary for it to collect many of the promised remaining incentives, The Frontier reported. 

Lies and No Apologies

And then came the real news. Dec. 19, 2024, local news station KFOR reported that a “former high-level Canoo employee who recently left the company within the past few months” had come forward with the revelation that Canoo never built any vehicles in Oklahoma. The three vehicles the state of Oklahoma purchased were built in Justin, Texas, by a separate company called AFV.

Not only that, but 140 engineers Canoo promised to relocate to Oklahoma from California never made the move, instead flying back and forth from the West Coast when necessary.

KFOR says they reached out to the governor’s office for a statement, but they never heard a word. They reached out to the state Department of Commerce, which said that it had only given Canoo $1 million and might attempt a “claw back.”

Why did Gov. Stitt have plenty of time to sit in front of the cameras extolling his phenomenal “get” for the state of Oklahoma but he doesn’t have enough time to get in front of the cameras and apologize to Oklahomans for abusing their tax dollars?

Did someone — anyone — from the state bother to look into this company before promising it millions in taxpayer dollars?

Paying For The Wind

For the answer, we can look at a pattern. Though former Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin revoked tax credits for new wind energy companies in 2017, wind energy company NextEra received $191 million in Oklahoma Investment/New Jobs credits during both 2022 and 2023, and the wind power generation industry has hauled in an estimated $1.25 billion in subsidies since 2013. Oklahoma employed about 400 people in the “wind electric power generation” sector from 2021 to 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. With $191 million in tax credits, Oklahoma is paying about $382,000 per worker — about seven times more than the average Oklahoma wage.

As NextEra is sponging up fat Oklahoma tax credits, they’re protesting the county tax valuations for their wind installations. For example, one school district saw NextEra protest 70 percent of its property taxes in 2020.

In 2022, the Oklahoma Supreme Court took up the issue of wind installations’ ad valorem tax assessments and agreed with a previous district court ruling that federal Production Tax Credits are not taxable and must be removed from county property tax valuations, leaving one school district with a $35 million state aid loss and a $40 million hole in their sinking fund. Other schools will be now be affected, as the ruling will cause counties with wind installations to reassess those property values.

This stings. Wall Street listed, private investor-backed NextEra has benefited from $2.4 billion in federal funds in addition to the nearly $1 billion in public funding provided it by the state of Oklahoma, yet they object to returning taxpayer dollars to school districts in the counties where they have wind turbine installations.

In addition, NextEra spent nearly $6 million in lobbying expenditures in 2024 to curry favor with 16 different federal agencies and funds three lobbyists at the Oklahoma State Capitol. Last year, NextEra’s directors were sued for “political misconduct” after a series of dark money-funded attempts to move votes away from a Florida Democrat during the 2020 election cycle. Isn’t this tantamount to taxpayers funding lobbyists to get more tax dollars?

Americans Taking Action

Fortunately, Americans are catching on to the green scam and the taxpayer handouts that fuel it. January began with a rally against green energy at the Oklahoma State Capitol on Legislative Organization Day and several bills have been filed for this session to rein in green energy and reduce or stop taxpayer subsidies. This is good news, but billions of dollars of taxpayer money is being given away elsewhere as corporate welfare , as at least one Oklahoma legislator pointed out this month.

Those who oversee projects such as the Canoo debacle and billions in corporate welfare should be made to apologize for their cavalier and irresponsible handling of citizens’ hard-earned cash. Yet Gov. Stitt’s office has shown that they will simply not respond to requests for comment and will try to ride off scot-free to their next ill-fated plan backed with someone else’s money.

Jenni White has a master’s in biology and has had careers in advertising, biology, epidemiology, and teaching. She is the former education director and co-founder of Reclaiming Oklahoma Parent Empowerment and has written for publications including The Pulse, the Heartland Institute, and American Thinker. She is a homeschooling mother of five and helps her husband run their microfarm. She can be reached at [email protected].