With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here! Have a tip? Email us at transitiontips@politico.com. More than a decade ago, Vice President JOE BIDEN’s chief of staff, RON KLAIN, helped convince President BARACK OBAMA to visit a California solar panel manufacturing facility to tout his administration’s investments in renewable energy. “Sounds like there are some risk factors here, but that’s true of any innovative company POTUS would visit,” Klain wrote in a 2010 email to Obama adviser VALERIE JARRETT. “It looks OK to me. … The reality is that if POTUS visited 10 such places over the next 10 months, probably a few will be belly-up by election day 2012 — but that to me is the reality of saying we want to help promote cutting-edge, new-economy industries.” Klain was right in one way. The company declared bankruptcy in 2011, and its name — Solyndra — became a byword for Republican attacks on Obama’s stimulus program (in part because the company had financial ties to one of his campaign bundlers. Even Obama would go on to admit that Solyndra was “a PR nightmare” “I couldn’t help but fume (sometimes I’d actually picture myself with steam puffing out of my ears, as in a cartoon) at how Solyndra’s failure stood to overshadow the Recovery Act’s remarkable success in galvanizing the renewable energy sector,” Obama wrote in his memoir. Biden is taking a different tack this time around. He flew to Michigan this morning to tour a Ford plant and talk up his plan s to invest in electric vehicles. Unlike Solyndra, Ford is a blue-chip company that posted a $3.3 billion quarterly profit last month. It almost certainly won’t be belly up by Election Day 2024. (And if it is, Biden will have much bigger problems on his hands.) But Biden’s caution hasn’t prevented Republicans from resurrecting the old Solyndra attacks. Republicans are bashing Biden’s plan to invest in clean energy as a job killer for the oil and gas sector. They’ve also seized on his decision last month to pay a virtual visit to a South Carolina plant run by Proterra, an electric bus manufacturer, as evidence the White House’s infrastructure proposal will be a Solyndra redux. Specifically, they’ve pointed to the fact that, until recently, Energy Secretary JENNIFER GRANHOLM sat on Proterra’s board. She still holds more than $1 million of stock in the company. Sen. JOHN BARRASSO (R-Wyo.) called on the Energy Department’s inspector general to investigate any potential conflicts of interest. Rep. RALPH NORMAN (R-S.C.) sent a letter to Granholm herself last week asking for documents related to her stake in Proterra. And the Republican National Committee has started going after her on the issue. “Granholm’s record makes Solyndra look like child’s play,” an RNC email blared this morning. The Energy Department has said Granholm wasn’t involved in Biden’s decision to meet with Proterra and that she’ll divest her stake by August, as required by her ethics agreement. “Secretary Granholm has acted in full accordance with the comprehensive ethical standards set by the Biden Administration,” an Energy Department spokesperson wrote in an email. The inspector general has told Barrasso’s office that she's “currently evaluating the concerns expressed in [his] letter to determine what next steps may be appropriate,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by West Wing Playbook. But while Republicans may be looking to dust off an old playbook, it’s not clear that it will be as effective this time around. That’s partially because green energy is hardly a new concept anymore. Solar power is far more widespread than when Solyndra was manufacturing panels. Electric vehicles are now relatively popular, too. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll last month found that 53 percent of voters backed Biden’s plan to spend $174 billion on electric vehicle infrastructure, including 27 percent of Republicans. JASON BORDOFF , a former climate and energy aide in the Obama White House, said the White House’s spending proposal made sense given the International Energy Agency’s warning that automakers need to stop selling cars with internal combustion engines by 2040. “There will be hits and misses in a diversified government portfolio of clean energy research, development, and deployment, and while politic might lead some to focus on any misses, the wins can yield dramatically larger gains for the United States in terms of both economic activity and emission reductions,” he wrote in an email to West Wing Playbook. 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