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
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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.”
Do not forget to include the cost increase of your home insurance, if any company will include solar panels at all. In SW Florida, I doubt wind insurance will cover these and it would make no sense to chance losing panels due to a hurricane without the ability to insure the cost of replacement. Also, will installation of solar panels on a shingled roof void the roof warranty?
Oh, another reason why the Chinese dominate PV cell manufacturing: Cheap energy. The production takes a lot of energy. EROEI for PV in Germany (granted; not the sunniest of places) is currently about 3.
So you don’t want to make your PV modules in Denmark or Germany, where electricity is a priced good.
I expect this very bad EROEI to go up in the future; perfectly in sync with the price reductions – the price of PV modules simply reflects the amount of energy used in their production, it’s that simple.
Lesson to America. Don’t try to out-subsidize the Chinese.
How many acres of solar panels does it take to replace an average fossil fuel power plant? For that matter, how many wind turbines does it take to do the same? How would complete replacement with such impact the climate?
You may be surprised by the answers you find 🙂
I bid 3 dollars. The new Obama 3 dollar bill is coming soon. (it is only worth 1 dollar due to inflation)
I can walk to this plant (this portion of Devens is in Ayer, MA). Lovely that the economic hit is going to be on my small town.
AJ
I’d like to repeat what Elmer said. “Tariffs” . I’ve been in manufacturing my whole life. The Chinese are at war with the American manufacturer. Its time for one of the political parties to address the unfair trade practices of our partners.
“Kozlowski March 14, 2012 at 12:20 am” Addresses part of the problem. China does not care one bit for the environment. They also don’t care about our patent laws, copyright laws, labor laws, currency manipulation, dumping, and counterfeiting. Put on top of that our manufacturers pay higher taxes and wages.
Free trade has been nothing more than a war on our middle class and is the root of our economic downturn.
Exactly my question. There is a BP Solar facility outside Fredrick Maryland and that thing is coated with solar panels of every shape, size, and description.
Henry chance said on March 14, 2012 at 5:49 am:
Uh-oh. You’ve stated there’ll soon be a connection between the ‘Bama and dead presidents.
Is someone knocking on your door right now? Will HSA even bother to knock?
Robert Brown says:
March 14, 2012 at 12:21 am
“ It seems high. ”
Thanks, Robert.
——————
And about the cost of travel and $8 gasoline: We live in an agricultural area where pruning of fruit trees and grape vines is underway. Low paid workers may drive 2 miles one day and 15 miles the next to get to the job site. The nearest “big box store” is 50 miles away. Teachers, nurses, and other such workers may travel 100 miles round-trip 5 days per week. Boating, horse riding, snow skiing, snowmobiling, and other such activities often require big/low-mileage vehicles. Contemplating a real doubling of the price of gas requires visualizing a significant restructuring of rural America.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
March 13, 2012 at 9:36 pm
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!
__________________________________________________________________________
They didn’t need to as they weren’t going to be there long.
Can you say, “All your money to us belongs.” ?
Classic pump and dump in bricks and mortar form.
Sure, walk away from it AFTER you repay all tax money you received.
The grants and tax breaks are given to encourage you to produce a product, not pay yourself bonuses and pay off corporate debt.
Hola, amigos. Larded companies should be located in Manteca. Gracias.
Current prices are ~$1.20 / Watt for panels. With tax breaks, subsidies (if they are still available) and a friend with an installers license you could actually make money right now. This won’t last once inventories start dropping. The long term outlook requires conventional electrical rates to keep going up. The low cost of natural gas has pushed the magic cross-over date further down the line.
Batteries?
Night use?
I see from Google Maps that the Devens plant is located on Barnum Road.
P.T. Barnum is widely credited with coining the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Jes’ sayin’…
Green jobs turn into red jobs.
The mad hatter Eco loons continue there march to destroy the Economy!
SETBACK FOR MERKEL’S VISION
Funding Shortage Threatens Germany’s Energy Revolution
Germany’s climate fund, a cornerstone of the government’s much hyped transition towards renewable energy, has been massively underfunded during its first year of operation. The Green Party has accused the government of failing in its plan to create an energy revolution.
The fund was created to provide additional financing for renewable energies, energy efficiency and national and international climate protection. Most of the fund’s financing was intended to come from the auctioning of emissions certificates. As of 2012, all the proceeds from Germany’s emissions trading will go into the fund. = anther part of the same scam!!!
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0%2c1518%2c814905%2c00.html#ref%3dnlint
AJ Abrams says:
March 14, 2012 at 6:20 am
I can walk to this plant (this portion of Devens is in Ayer, MA). Lovely that the economic hit is going to be on my small town.
___________________________
That is why I moved out of that area a couple of decades ago. Too much regulation kills business and every single company my husband and I worked for in MA (several) no longer exists.
You also have to consider that in some areas of the country roof top solar panels might only survive for 4-5 years before they get wiped out by large hail.
There are lots of “hidden expenses” to solar, so the user needs to include not only the cost per watt for the panels, but the inverter/controller, battery packs if he/she uses local storage or the hardware to use grid storage. Then add in various maintenance expenses like cleaning the panels periodically, dealing with reduced output due to aging, shading of the panels at certain times of the year by trees and occasional bird droppings on the panel etc. Battery packs have maintenance requirements if lead acid and periodic battery replacement depending on how well they are held at float charge voltages and properly maintained so they never are over charged, run with low electrolyte levels etc.
Throw in small risks for damage to the panels by lightning, wind storm, snow loads and just plain aging causing bad electrical connections and the “life time system cost” will be several times the cost of the panels.
I have some solar panels in storage as emergency backup power during storms or other long duration power outages. I also went completely off grid one summer on a small solar panel system. It worked great as long as I very carefully managed my power consumption. Right up until a wind storm with 80+ mph wind gusts destroyed the solar panels.
Larry
DaveR says:
March 14, 2012 at 6:24 am
I’d like to repeat what Elmer said. “Tariffs” . I’ve been in manufacturing my whole life. The Chinese are at war with the American manufacturer. Its time for one of the political parties to address the unfair trade practices of our partners….
___________________________________
I agree but a world agreement on tariffs is why the USA is in the World Trade Organization and why China was allowed to join. It is an international agreement on tariffs by an international organization run by international corporations. Presently only about 30% of all goods imported into the USA are subject to tariffs. Profit not loyalty to a country, not concern for the worker, not concern for the environment is what it is all about and all it has ever been about. Everything else is window dressing for the ordinary Joe so he will swallow it without kicking up a dust.
the WTO was signed in 1995 and China signed in December of 2001. SEE:
Details of the USA – China – WTO Trade Deal aka CHINA TRADE RELATIONS ACT AND China’s Entry Into The WTO 10 Years Later Is Not What President Clinton Promised
Then take a look at the Trade Balance Graph
This chart on historic tariffs vs tax revenue for the Federal government is also really interesting. When you compare say 1960 (7.3% tariff) to 2010 (1.3% tariff) The % of the Federal budget stayed the same so the politicians and the International Corporations are very happy with the situation.
There is much more info (links) on the whole sorry economic mess in this comments I made:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/13/climate-craziness-of-the-week-eugenics-is-making-a-comeback-with-climate-optimized-human-engineering/#comment-921845
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/01/britain-pulls-the-plug-on-solar-subsidies/#comment-784546
The tragedy is that panel costs are down well below $1/watt and no one bothered to look because they were too busy subsidizing a sector that was loaded up with also rans in start-up mode and a sizable number of entities that were driven by Federal DOE grant and loan money with the incentive to look busy and buy time with other peoples money. Meanwhile the subset of solar firms with viable business plans and cost profiles did not get the attention and focus they deserved. This pretty much defines the outlines of what political science of fake energy policy looks and smells like. It did not have to play out this way, but too many people looked the other way out of ignorance and fast buck greed that was on par with anything on Wall Street.
Robert Brown says: March 14, 2012 at 12:21 am
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.
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…
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.
———————————————-
Several points. First, if the modules were $1 per Watt, installation costs and inverter costs are not coming down at the same rate. At that price point, the PV modules are not the most expensive component.
Second, that reference is comparing retail price with generation cost. That’s only valid if the installation is owned by the retail-paying consumer. Transmission and distribution costs, capital equipment investment, and profit must be added to get the difference between cost and price.
Third, at least some of the numbers are badly skewed. For example, the cost of “advanced nuclear” is given at $.10 per KWh. Current wholesale price of nuke power is half that, therefore cost must be less than half that given.
Fourth, the reference claims the cells are good for 50 years, and usees longer payback times to calculate low cost/KWh. I think that’s an optimistic projection considering the cell technology is far younger than that and obviously, nobody has actual performance figures for that duration.
I like PV power, but let’s not ‘adjust’ the data.
‘Evergreen Solar. Think beyond’.
Beyond – what, exactly..?
I am highly skeptical that large scale solar or ‘natural’ energy collection techniques will ever be elaborated to such an extent that it will replace the carbon-based, geo-chemical fuels now in use. I see this as a low energy return on energy investment (EROEI) issue. It would also be an environmental problem if large tracts of land had to be set aside for solar energy collection in an attempt to provide the same energy for society now provided by carbon. Many would decry the mandated extinction of endangered animals and plant species as these huge solar energy collection structures took over the land.
The initial reason for assuming that the use of carbon energy would become a thing of the past was the theory that we were nearing a climatic breaking point that was going to force the immediate suspension of carbon power use. Many still believe this even though there is mounting evidence that this fear developed as a result of a self-deprecating, anti-humanistic mythology that feeds on itself.
A second and more inescapable reason for predicting the eventual end of the era of carbon energy is the finite nature of the resource. Sooner or later, it will be exhausted, at least as a resource we can afford to use. As fear sells, there have been several premature predictions that modern society was about to collapse from imminent energy starvation. Currently, some have said that our sub-prime mortgage crisis was due to financial miscalculations because petroleum production had not doubled once more, as it had done in the past. It does, however, appear that we are now in a transition period between using high EROEI petroleum that gushes out of the ground to low EROEI petroleum that has to be extracted or mined.
I believe that the message of eventual carbon depletion is that we should be looking for a new sustainable concentrated energy source with a positive attitude and not dismiss any untried option out of hand until it is actually *proved* to be impractical. It does look like many ‘green-energy’ schemes like the one above have now proven themselves to be inadequate for our current population.
For reference, there is an “Olduvai Theory,” which states that our industrial civilization will have a lifetime of less than or equal to [and perhaps greater than] 100 years (1930-2030) based on the assumption that no new alternative sustainable energy source will be found.
The Olduvai Theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory
A recent YouTube video cartoon with the ominous title “There’s No Tomorrow” seems to make the best and most entertaining case I have seen for eventual carbon depletion, often referred to as ‘Peak Oil.’ As far as I can tell, this video does not predict a specific date for the end of the carbon era. I think anyone who says “We will never run out of oil,” may one day find himself in the same category as Congressman Barney Frank, or Senator John McCain when he said “The economy is fundamentally sound.”
There’s No Tomorrow