Shocker: BP quits solar power industry

I remember when BP Amoco got into pre pregs to use in building sailboats. Big oil will always try new industries and leave some sectors that don’t make money. If they stay in solar, the business risk is subsidies.

Reality is such a tough taskmaster. GK

As a former owner of a solar company, I understand this completely. only one solar application makes sense: heating water. The idea that solar panels can do anything other than serve as a boutique power source is simply boneheaded.

The beginnings of the CG2 big fallout?

Their going to play this as just “Big Oil” doing something nefarious and immoral to support their oil prices.

I often think that Governments and Company’s should employ reasonably educated, street smart lay people instead of idiotic professionals.
My self for example:
I predicted the financial crash many years ago by the actions of governments and the banksters.
I said the well before the invasion of Iraq it was a huge mistake due to the pathetic WOMD and yellow cake evidence and the fact that Saudi Arabia was the source of the 911 hijackers.
I said the well before Kyoto and Global warming grabbed the Western world governments by the Nuts it was a huge hoax and absolutely stupid to expect the West to go it alone.
I said the that wind power would be a huge and expensive boondoggle and drive energy cost through the roof.
I said solar power will prove to be a huge and expensive mistake.
I said solar power will will not be made in ANY western country competitively enough to manufacture it in the long term and it will fail.
I said solar power will be manufactured in China cheaply and sold to the west expensively.
I read and follow the news and think what the hell that will not work because………….
Call me a Skeptic with common sense and the ability to see the obvious.
the same common sense of most of the readers here at WUWT and skeptics in general have.
If any Government, organization or wealthy individual wants to hire me , I’m available.
My track record is 90+%
Futurist Dave.

just a quote from the press release:
“BP Solar is withdrawing from an industry that’s facing oversupply and price pressures after Asian competitors increased production. Panel prices plunged 48 percent this year, helping tip three U.S. makers including Solyndra LLC into bankruptcy, and Solon SE (SOO1), Germany’s first listed solar company, filed for insolvency last week.”

Dear Tom
“The bottom line is that it’s the bottom line that counts.
Being ‘green’ costs too much green.”
Totally wrong. Supply and Demand.
yours Harvey

harvey said @ur momisugly December 21, 2011 at 10:57 am
“Actually the big problem is that the WEST cannot compete with the solar products coming out of China… Nothing else. If China sells panels for 1/2 your cost well your company is hosed.
I thought you guys were all for freemarkets driving the economy.”
Unfortunately, the West hasn’t had a free market economy since the 19thC. And the Western governments have squandered taxes for the last 50 years. Currently, China has a policy of jobs at any cost, a policy that will eventually collapse under demands from the hoi poloi for a better quality of environment as their prosperity continues to rise. The West handed over its IP and manufacturing to China for free and the Chinese are taking full advantage.
It’s an interesting little planet we live on 🙂

I’ve got 2.5kW of BP Solar panels on the roof, been there since ’03…
No, the Chinese do not believe in a level playing field. Are they ‘subsidizing’ solar panel production? Yeah, maybe. What’s the best model for the rest of us in the long run – is the loss of production capacity in the West worse than the benefit to Western consumers through availability of a cheap commodity product funded by the Chinese government?
For any individual product, probably the latter. For an economy as a whole where it involves hollowing out entire sectors, far more debatable.
Will there eventually be a PV solar production process – ‘printable’ panels, for instance – that’ll render the Chinese investment in silicon PV moot?

Well I would like a dollar for every media report on the profitability of this or that segment of the Solar power industry; and another dollar for each asserted reason for the demise of this or that participant. So BP solar is going ppffft because panel prices dropped 48 percent.
Hey ! Earth to Bloomberg; a whole lot more solar energy companies (besides Solyndra) will go belly up; UNLESS solar panel prices come down a whole lot more than they have. The Solyndra apologists blamed China for bombing the prices on them. It can be concluded then, that Solyndra would never have been able to make a profit, unless solar power was much more expensive than it already is. Hey; the idea for replacing some already existing technology, in a given market place such as energy, is to have a more efficient, cheaper energy source than the entrenched competition. You dont replace an existing industry by being more expensive, and less efficient.
In Solyndra’s case, they might have been able to make their solar panels for zero cost (let’s imagine), and they still would have gone belly up, because nobody in their right mind, would ever buy a Solyndra solar panel, and use it to occupy the precious solar insolation space on their roof or other valuable real estate. You only get 1 kW per square metre (max), so if you don’t put up the highest power conversion efficiency receivers in that space, you must be crazy.
Long before Solyndra became a political and financial scam; it was a science and engineering scam, and Nobel Laureate Energy Secretary Chu, should have seen that, and nipped the whole fraud in the bud.
Well a Nobel Prize for Optical Trapping, that somebody else invented anyway, doesn’t necessarily make one an expert on PV solar energy collection.
Solyndra used the yuppy thin film CIGS PV material; the acronym for Copper, Indium Gallium Selenide. The world record Laboratory conversion effciency achieved for CIGS material is about 19%. Practical cells seem to be more in the 11-13 percent range; but it’s “cheap” they claim, and you don’t use very much of those exotic materials; well compared to silicon; which largely occupies the world’s tropical deserts.
So since the material is cheap, Solyndra decided to use more of it, than they really needed; pi times as much as it turns out, since instead of a simple flat panel of their cheap goop, they filled the space with a cylindrical tube of the stuff, aimed at the same incoming solar beam. CIGS is claimed to be strongly solar absorbing, so one can conclude that the top side of the tube effectively shadows the bottom side of the tube which thereby doesn’t get much sun at all. So they coated the CIGS on the outside of a glass cylinder, and now they have pi times as much substrate glass, as well as pi times as much CIGS.
Well actually it’s much worse than that because CIGS like many of the II-VI compounds such as Cadmium Selenide, just doesn’t like moisture; which happens to be a permanent constituent of the earth’s atmosphere.
So they enclosed the CIGS tube inside a second larger tube, and hermetically sealed them to protect the CIGS from destruction.
That’s now 2pi times as much glass as for a flat plate silicon panel. Making glass, is of course a somewhat energy consuming process, not vastly different from making silicon. Yes CIGS is much cheaper than silicon, I am sure.
Those cyclindrical tubes of course cast shaows, as the sun moves around them, so you have to space themn apart so they dont shade each other; so that is even more valuable real estate you have to dedicate to this boondoggle, impractical scheme.
In short, Solyndra never had other than a Rube Goldberg solar panel to sell, in the first place; and my apologies to Rube for associating his name with such incompetence.
How come Physics whizz Chu didnt know this, and stop wasting taxpayer’s funds on the scam.
With PV solar energy, virtually nothing matters except the conversion efficiency, because that is what determines how much area you have to sacrifice to solar collection.
I recently attended a solar energy Symposium, at the University of California, Merced. At that meeting, a new record conversion efficiency for multijunction solar cells was announced.
43.5 % or thereabouts was reported for a triple junction cell; that of course is a triple bandgap cell, to efficiently convert a wider swath of the solar energy continuum spectrum of energies.
A thin Gallium Arsenide cell process was also reported, shoing that lower materials usage is not the exclusive domain of materials that you can spray on anything, out of a garden hose.
Fron the UC Santa Barbara Team, came a report on another wide bandgap, high conversion efficiency material, a GaN/InGaN structure; some chap named Nakamura was heavily involved with that Team. I almost got lulled into thinking I was watching an LED process paper, rather than a solar cell one; but it was pointed out in another paper, that good solar cells should also be good LEDs; well not necessarily of visible radiation. Indirect materials such as Silicon are of course an exception; which is why they have efficiency limits.
The newer exotic materials, and Non-Imaging optical systems point to more effective usage of these materials, to get higher power conversion efficiencies, and better use of real estate.
Cheap low efficiency solar panels; will always be a drag on the use of solar energy, whose supply is limited by the sun.
But it will never replace existing energy sources, unless it is cost competitive; and that usually means on an energy capital basis, not some economist shell shuffling game.
We got to where we are now without external help from somewhere else (ET), so we know that we have had a net energy availability gain, since primordial times. Substitute sources, simply will never succeed, unless they too can hoist themselves by their own shoe laces, without cost hiding subsidy from an already effective source.
It makes no sense to consume already existing energy supplies, to access other sources, that make even less total energy available to do the useful stuff, we use energy for.