BOSTON (AP) — Evergreen Solar is asking a bankruptcy judge for permission to walk away from its former plant in Devens.
The company, which received tens of millions in state aid before shuttering its facilities last year and moving its manufacturing operations to China, filed the notice in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware on Monday.
Interested parties including MassDevelopment, which helps finance and develop new projects, have until Friday to respond to the filing.
A spokeswoman for MassDevelopment declined comment Tuesday, saying the filing speaks for itself.
Evergreen received more than $20 million in grants and $11 million in tax and lease initiatives from Massachusetts. That doesn’t include other tax benefits and millions in upgrades to roads and utilities around the plant.
Gov. Deval Patrick championed Evergreen Solar early in his first term.
h/t to WUWT reader Ed Mertin
Here’s the Devens plant from the air:
Image from PV-tech.org
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I’ll bid $1…
“Publicly larded”. Well played, sir…
WTF? I thought Bernie Madoff was in prison.
Where are all the solar cell panels that should be powering the factory? Shouldn’t they have covered the roof with them? It’s their own product, they could have gotten them at cost, with no shipping charges!
I don’t live in Massachusetts[*], so I’m not as familiar with this company as I could be, but they had the decency to run into financial problems before they could spend all the money the state had planned to lend them.
Sometimes New Hampshire loses out on attracting new business by not being able to offer big tax breaks and whatnot. Oftentimes that winds up being a good thing, the businesses we get tend to be strong enough to not need taxpayer assistance.
[*]: I was in Massachusetts in 1974 when they passed their “temporary” state income tax surcharge. I thought it a bit odd that the legislation didn’t have an expiration date….
Evergreen. Smells just like Solyndra.
“Patrick began touting Evergreen during his 2006 campaign, and moved quickly as governor to wager tens of millions of taxpayer dough to entice the firm to build its solar panel plant in Devens. But by then, Krop said, solar companies in Asia were rapidly expanding their solar panel plants in a bid to undercut U.S. manufacturers, meaning the Devens plant was doomed.”
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20110119evergreen_solar_eclipse_gov_slow_to_release_public_records_on_deal/
It isn’t clear to me just what “to walk away from” means. Who takes possession? Often these “designed for a single purpose” buildings, if auctioned, will bring only a fraction of the cost of construction. One, I think, was then bought by a principal of an original investor in said company. A sweet deal.
———————————–
On the NoTricksZone, Peter Gosselin’s site, there is this quote about batteries:
“For a single electric car, about as much additional energy is consumed as what is contained by 10,000 litres of gasoline.”
http://notrickszone.com/2012/03/13/spiegel-lets-the-genie-out-writes-on-germanys-church-of-environmentalism-and-its-absurdities/
Has anyone seen a report about batteries that would confirm this? Links?
I wonder about solar panel production, installation, and maintenance.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
“Think beyond” motto of evergreensolar = Move to China – file for bankruptcy…..And not a Solar Panel on it’s own roof
The most corrupt Administration in U.S. history?
Jack H. Barnes says: I’ll bid $1…
SOLD!
Now lemme see, I paid $19,007 for what is now 1667 shares of ESLRQ, worth $116. Your generous bid of $1/sh will bring my losses down to only $17,340.
Solar power will become viable when the cost of panels reaches $1 per Watt. Until then it simply cannot provide a reasonable ROI to justify installing it, except perhaps in really high power rate locations such as Hawaii… I’d love to put solar shingles on my roof, but not at current prices.
The failure of individual new ventures is not significant. High-risk brings high failures: you cannot have one without the other. What is significant is the proportion that fail, and when that failure is either technological or principle-economic. The failure of solar power (as well as wind) results from both.
I believe there’s a half-million dollars property tax for the land leased thru a Mass. agency, so they asked to be relieved from it. Think it was in the WSJ. No one was interested in purchasing it. Sold their infrastructure or whatever for like $10mil.
On a positive note, so far no video of the destroying product, post bankruptcy, like with Solyndra.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_trifluoride#Greenhouse_gas
Solar is not particularly environmentally friendly. Why do people think it is?
In China they make little to no attempt to recover NF3 during production. It escapes into the atmosphere. It has a greenhouse warming potential 17,200 times greater than CO2 and a lifetime over 500 years vs a few for CO2.
Tests done a few years ago “unexpectedly” found levels 400% greater than expected. Fortunately it is measured in parts per trillion.
“Research has questioned the previous assumptions. High-volume applications such as DRAM computer memory production, the manufacturing of flat panel displays and the large-scale production of thin-film solar cells in regions with insufficient ecological awareness continues to increase the emissions of NF3.[11][12]” – from the wikipedia article…
Has anyone seen a report about batteries that would confirm this?
It seems high. A gallon of gasoline has a lot of energy in it; that’s why it makes such great fuel. IIRC a liter contains roughly 10 kW-hours, so that’s 100 MW-hours of energy total. That’s stating, in other words, that to build the batteries in a single electric car requires the total power output from a megawatt plant for over four days.
I doubt it. Very much. It sounds more than an order of magnitude high — smelting metal requires energy, sure, but not that much energy and surely not so much more energy than that required to smelt the steel, aluminum, titanium, and other metals that go into making a car and an ordinary engine.
Solar power will become viable when the cost of panels reaches $1 per Watt. Until then it simply cannot provide a reasonable ROI to justify installing it, except perhaps in really high power rate locations such as Hawaii… I’d love to put solar shingles on my roof, but not at current prices.
Precisely. Although the prices are dropping fast and predictably. The sad thing isn’t “just” that the Chinese undercut US prices and (given a complete lack of protection, just like all of the other businesses that are undercut by third world manufacturing in countries where people will work for janitors’ wages here) — it is that we can’t seem to build a foundry that uses our one edge — superior technology — to make them cheaper than the Chinese can in spite of their advantages on the labor front. Of course the Chinese government subsidizes the hell out of their new solar foundries, looking at the long term global market and countries that (like Hawaii) have little reliable energy infrastructure and high energy prices.
OTOH, at $1/watt or better, installing roof units will be close to a no-brainer, and the big US players will get into the game and build serious foundries and the prices will then really drop. Sometime between 2015 and 2020, extrapolating the price curves…
Yes, I know Willis doesn’t like this, but:
http://solarcellcentral.com/cost_page.html
…I disagree. I think that this site does a decent job of laying out the economics, both with and without subsidies of any sort. Even without subsidies, at $1/watt solar is going to be cheaper than everything but nuclear and hydroelectric power. It won’t replace fuel based plants (at least, not unless/until someone engineers serious high-density storage) but there will be a crossover to where solar grows much faster than any other technology for producing energy.
I’ll state up-front (and take the inevitable flames:-) — I personally think that trying to stimulate local manufacture of solar cells is a really good idea, and that the Chinese are kicking our ass because they understand this. After all, they have a huge population, lousy energy resources, and a whole modern industrial base to build that is hungry for energy (as does India). They also have enormous amounts of essentially fallow land — the population is concentrated in regions with water, for example, near the main rivers. They don’t give a goddamn about CO_2 emissions, but they do care a great deal about importing expensive fuel, and they are perfectly happy to build solar plants that can drive daytime manufacturing and fall back to alternative energy for “people” in the evenings and nights.
But then, I also think that we should be investing in — and subsidizing — the aggressive development of thorium-based nuclear energy generation, the building of next-gen regular (uranium-based) fission, and fusion, where the latter is the mother lode — “the” energy resource for the next million years of human evolution.
As for electric cars or other electrical means of transportation — we’ll see. We are once again watching what happens to energy prices in a world with political and military volatility that affect global supplies. This isn’t all “Obama” — look at what happened to oil and gas prices under GWBush, who had to be the best friend the oil industry ever had in office and who fought an entire pointless war to ensure that his buddies would continue to have access to all that oil under the sands of Iraq. Personally, I’d like to see the US move away from dependence on imported resources, especially energy resources. Coal is good — we have lots of coal. Oil, IMO, is too valuable to burn and will be increasingly expensive to obtain in the quantities we require, completely independent of the question of whether or not it is actually desirable to pump up atmospheric CO_2 to 600 ppm or more. Cheap and abundant electricity will provide a strong incentive to reconfigure our society around electric transportation, I think.
I drive a Ford Excursion — the world’s largest passenger car, actually, although not quite the worst mileage (the Hummer has even worse mileage and is marginally smaller) at 11.5-13.5 mpg. We also have a Toyota Prius, one of the most “socially conscious” cars. The Excursion costs roughly 4x as much to move around town (however useful it is for long distance hauls with lots of people and luggage). I’d be perfectly thrilled to have a second (well, third) car that is more like the Prius, very high mileage, for everyday commuting, and given that I drive only 3 miles to and from work, an electric car or electric scooter would be perfectly adequate. Note well that my 6 mile commute costs me around $2/day in gasoline in the Excursion; a trip over to Chapel Hill to buy brewing supplies adds $7-8 to the cost of a batch of beer.
Sure, maybe one day gasoline will be cheaper again as tensions in Iran ease, or maybe Israel will bomb Iran, Iran will close the Straits of Hormuz and nuke Israel, which will nuke Iran back, and we’ll see half the oil fields of the middle east doused with fallout and blockaded by wars, driving the price of gasoline in the US to $7-8/gallon almost overnight. It wouldn’t even take a war — a single earthquake in just the wrong place, a medium sized asteroid (like the two that are making near-miss passes over the next three years) in just the wrong place, and world energy supplies could be horribly disrupted to our great detriment.
I think it would be just peachy to not depend on gasoline quite so much — ideally not the hard way, but the easy way that doesn’t actually require us to give up our luxurious personal transportation lifestyle. Maybe it will be electric cars, maybe it will be the development of domestic resources, maybe it will be something startling and new, but it is by no means clear that the “modern” automobile is anything like optimal for human civilization.
rgb
Johannes Herbst
Wilky says:
March 13, 2012 at 10:51 pm
Solar power will become viable when the cost of panels reaches $1 per Watt. Until then it simply cannot provide a reasonable ROI to justify installing it, except perhaps in really high power rate locations such as Hawaii… I’d love to put solar shingles on my roof, but not at current prices.
Hi Wilky,
Here in Germany the costs of solar PV panels are already down to 0.59 Euro plus 19% VAT per watt. This should come close to the 1$ benchmark. Of course, they are from China, but Monocristaline ones and with a 10 years guarantee.
I’m somehow green, but no warmist, and I like the idea of getting independent from power companies. I plan to replace on the southern part of my roof the old roof tiles with solar modules, saving the costs of new tiles. This would cut down the costs of PV solar even more.
They should have left it as Ft Devens…..
Jack H Barnes says:
March 13, 2012 at 9:33 pm
I’ll bid $1…
Be careful ! Obama may snatch your hand off.
Instead of blackmail, the US taxpayer has been GREENmailed…..AGAIN!
As long as the government is the one picking winners (a rarity) and losers (99% of the time), there will always be HUGE misallocations of limited resources of land/labor/capital.
Just let the market decide what and when a technology is feasible. It’s very good at it; certainly far better than bureaucrat hacks with agendas are…
Samurai; I think you are only half right. The government can not pick winners,but they are near 100% at picking losers. God help the small business (or big business) that gets any attention from one of the three-letter job killers; IRS, EPA, DEA, FDA . . .
I do believe we get more Wattage on this site, than the vast majority of solar corps. do.
Tariffs!
Reblogged this on News You May Have Missed.
Robert Brown says:
March 14, 2012 at 12:21 am
“I’ll state up-front (and take the inevitable flames:-) — I personally think that trying to stimulate local manufacture of solar cells is a really good idea, and that the Chinese are kicking our ass because they understand this.”
Robert, I’m with you with regard to the price curve of solar and that in 10 to 15 years it will just be too cheap to not use it. But
-subsidizing the use of solar cells simply redistributes billions of Dollars, as can be seen in Germany, if you want that, be my guest, we now pay close to Danish electricity tariffs and they have the world’s highest. The redistribution is from poor to rich, and it reliably KILLS employment – energy intensive industries are moving out of Germany right now. Again, maybe that’s the goal.
-We should WAIT until it becomes cost-efficient to use PV. Billions of subsidies do nothing much to an exponential curve but shift it by a few months; and the cost-effectiveness of PV is an exponential.
-The Chinese “manufacture” their solar cells using machinery from Centrotherm and Roth&Rau. You want to “manufacture” some? (not much “manus” in there…)? Send money to Centrotherm or Roth&Rau. They’ll build you a complete factory. That factory will be good for about 5 years, then you buy the next one…
Competition drives the prices down all by itself. The subsidies were just shifting the exponential a bit foreward, but didn’t change its exponent (It’s always like that with exponentials).
At various times there have been announcements by semiconductor companies that they’d beat Intel’s roadmap – and Intel bases its roadmap on Moore’s Law. Sun said, we’ll double performance in half the time Intel takes. Years later, NVidia made a similar announcement. Both of these announcements amounted to nothing. You can’t change the exponent of these developments – you can try really hard, and invest all the money you can borrow, yet all you’ll achieve is a one-time shift of the curve on the time axis, but probably it will exhaust your resources so much that the competition will then make good lost ground while you have to reduce your relentless speed…
Solar power is one of several energy sources of the future. But you can’t rush it. That’s a losing proposition. In some remote spots and islands, solar power plus batteries is already the cheapest and most reliable way to get electricity. As it gets cheaper, this market niche will naturally and steadily expand. And that’s how it should be.
Commercial electrolysis units have an efficiency of 85%. We will synthesize NatGas (Methane) from solar power and wind power. Again, this is inevitable. You can pump billions of subsidies into it but that is just redistribution. Makes a politician look powerful, I suppose. Doesn’t accelerate the technological development by much. Creates lots of opportunities for grift.
Johannes Herbst says:
March 14, 2012 at 12:38 am
“Here in Germany the costs of solar PV panels are already down to 0.59 Euro plus 19% VAT per watt. This should come close to the 1$ benchmark. Of course, they are from China, but Monocristaline ones and with a 10 years guarantee.”
Johannes, these days the Chinese silicon monocristalline modules are perfectly fine with regards to durability.
When talking about price per Watt-peak you have to include cost of inverter and installation; usually that doubles it.