Guest essay by Eric Worrall
SunEdison, whose share price has plunged by around 75% in the last few months, is rumoured to be on the verge of laying off a significant number of staff.
According to Greentech Media;
With its stock price taking a hit, SunEdison is planning a deep cut to its workforce, according to a memo obtained by GTM.
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Investor confidence had been wavering for some time. Many were having a hard time understanding SunEdison’s acquisition spree — specifically, the $2.2 billion purchase of the residential installation company Vivint Solar in July.
Executives called the Vivint acquisition a big step toward creating the first renewable energy supermajor. The street wasn’t fully convinced of the plan.
With its stock still under pressure, SunEdison is now culling its workforce. According to a company-wide memo from CEO Ahmad Chatila released on September 30, SunEdison will be laying off around 10 percent of its 7,300 employees. Many employees received notices on Friday.
“Overall, the proposed changes result in an overall reduction of about 30%, 20% being from non-labor expenses and about 10% from headcount reduction. And this process will take some time to complete. Most of the changes will be announced during the fourth quarter with some final steps expected in the first quarter of 2016,” reads the memo.
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According to Yahoo Finance, over the last 52 weeks Sun Edison’s share price has crashed from a mid July high of $33.45, to a low of $6.56, recovering slightly to the current price of $8.33.
Sun Edison may have been hit hard by the recent global trend of governments scaling back subsidies for renewables. They have spoken out on several occasions against cutbacks to government subsidies for solar energy.
Sun Edison share price is obviously quite volatile, so it is impossible to say at this point whether the current fall represents a blip, or something more serious. For example, a strong renewable commitment from Paris COP 21, or renewed government interest in supporting solar energy, might lead to a recovery in Sun Edison share price.
Has Sun Edison has received federal loan guarantees from the US government? I couldn’t find any definitive information about this – but given Obama’s recent pledge to dramatically increase federal assistance for renewable energy, such guarantees are a possibility.
Recent acquisitions have nearly doubled SunEdison’s debt load and increased negative operating cash flow. The Vivint acquisition, which wasn’t an obvious fit with SunEdison’s culture and traditional business of building large solar-power plants, added to investor skepticism.
The stock has become a playground for hedge funds.
Besides, SunEdison may have triggered a margin call on its $410 million margin loan.
Here’s an article on that possibility:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-05/bad-news-piles-hedge-fund-hotel-sunedison-first-315mm-margin-call-now-mass-layoffs
Since Friday a.m. this stock has risen from $7 to a steady $9 today. Not dead yet !
Well if someone bought it at let’s say $30, they’d probably feel like dying.
From that Greentech media article:
In a vote of confidence in the company, Chatila purchased 9,700 shares of stock in August and an additional 4,800 in September. He now owns 850,472 shares in the company. Chief Financial Officer Brian Wuebbels also purchased 50,000 shares in August.
They made a little money today.
How is Chinese dumping of their antsolar panels in the US these days?
Despite all the arm-waving, the faux industry of Big Green, which is a subsidiary of Big Climate, is built on lies, and on the backs of both ratepayers and taxpayers.
Just to finish a thread: Of the “rare and nonrecylable materials” (could be one or the other), aluminum is described by George as being “as common as dirt.” Show me an aluminum nugget sometime, to prove the point. Hard to come by. Raw aluminum is never found in nature. You have to dissolve bauxite in molten cryolite and separate aluminum from oxygen by electrolysis. Releases lots of fluorine in the process, not well contained. (I lived not too far from an aluminum “smelter.” We call it a smelter, but the process is not smelting.) The point being, that the aluminum comes at the cost of the electrical energy needed to separate it from its oxide and keep the whole process at molten aluminum temperature.
There are trace elements (dopants) in the silicon solar cells that eventually migrate through the silicon and reduce the effectiveness of the cells. I think any solar cell has, in principle, a maximum energy recovery due to lifetime effects. How do you separate dopants from silicon? I have no idea; they are trace quantities. This is probably what was meant by “nonrecyclable”. Like the paint on a can of Monster energy drink. You can recycle the aluminum, but you can’t recycle the paint.
The list goes on and on. The only really recyclable way of obtaining solar energy is to plant trees, grow them, cut them down, and burn them. Oops! The carbon cycle! Oh, well…
“””””….. How do you separate dopants from silicon? I have no idea; they are trace quantities. …..”””””
So Michael, why are you talking here about something that you have “no idea” about ??
You don’t find Silicon lying around in foot diameter single crystal ingots either so what is the relevance of having to get Aluminum out of its ores.
Oxygen, Silicon, and Aluminum in that order are the three most abundant elements in the earth’s crust.
So as I said they are as common as dirt since that’s what earth’s crust consists of mostly.
Oxygen is almost half of the earth’s crust, and silicon is a bit more than one quarter.
Gee, just about like in SiO2.
Aluminum is the commonest metal and is twice as abundant as iron which is the second most plentiful metal.
And in order to make silicon photocells (solar cells) you first have to (re)cycle the native ore, and remove virtually ALL of the impurities, until it is 99.99999% or more purity.
The “dopants” deliberately introduced into the pure silicon to make solar cells, are orders of magnitude higher in concentration than in seven nines pure silicon. And recycling the silicon to get back to pure silicon is trivial.
Same goes for GaAs. We used to grow single crystal GaAs in about one kg sizes. That wasn’t the limit, but was a size that could be conveniently handled in the production environment we had. We had 72 Horizontal Bridgeman gradient freeze crystal growing furnaces (all of which we built ourselves, and we were about to double that number, until we came up with alternative designs for LED numeric displays for hand held calculators, that cut the material needs in half.
The scrap material including diamond sawing rubble was recycled to regenerate 7 nines purity Gallium. We supplied about half of our crystal growing raw gallium, from our own recycling (on site) and the other half from purchases. The amount of Gallium we could get was only limited by how much we needed.
As the LED industry grew, the Aluminum companies simply extracted more Gallium from their aluminum processes, as needed.
Earth’s crust contains O, Si, And Al in just about the right ratio to supply the semiconductor needs of solar panels. So there is no shortage of raw materials.
As for any rare earths used in high strength magnets; just wait till everybody’s car has electric motors instead of fossil fuelled engines, if you want to see a bottle neck.
And I’m about done with wasting my time dealing with straw men created by people who ” don’t have any idea “.
I’m sure that Google can link you to reams of information about any aspect of PV solar you want to learn about. Well I assume that they can.
Maybe they can’t.
Well, I beg your pardon for taking your simile seriously. Aluminum is notorious for its intractability toward chemical isolation. Napoleon had a cup of aluminum that he prized above dinnerware of gold, because it was probably the only such sample of the metal in the world, in his day. My back yard dirt is common enough that I can go out and scoop it up with my hands. I don’t have to worry about cryolite, high temperatures, and huge electrical powerplants to help me out.
What is interesting is your statement that silicon can be recycled back to high purity. I was expecting the situation might have been similar to recycling of aluminum, where it is accepted that the alloy elements are along for the ride, and the recycled aluminum will simply not be of very high purity. Or, it may have been simpler to burn the silicon back to the oxide and start over from scratch (it works better that way with trees). And I’m not disputing anything with you on that one.
Michael, we have something like 92 different elements in the earth’s crust, and you would be surprised as to how they vary in properties from one to another.
So you can’t substitute Aluminum (an electro-negative metal) for sulfur (a non metal) in the construction of an airplane fuselage; or vice versa.
Different elements have different properties so they get used for different applications.
Now Aluminum; the commonest metal, as ordinarily fabricated just does not like to exist in a structured single crystalline form, but it can form alloys that contain solid solutions and also compounds.
Silicon on the other hand, like carbon, has a very stable and densely compact single crystal structure, that can easily be grown.
Both carbon and silicon, and Germanium, (also alpha tin) all can crystallize in the
” diamond lattice “, to give the most compact sold forms we know of, and in the case of carbon, the hardest known. These crystals, at least the silicon, and germanium ones can be grown on a seed crystal, and pulled out of a melt of the material into a large single crystal. The interface between the liquid melt, and the solid crystal, is maintained very accurately at the melting/freezing Temperature.
So you can take all of your scrap silicon (or raw silicon) and melt it. Some kinds of impurities can be removed from the melt by chemical processes, which don’t attack the silicon.
At the boundary between the solid and the liquid, a process called segregation takes place, and some impurity (a) dissolved in the molten silicon, will pass into the solid crystal and some of it will remain in the liquid. How much does which is governed by the ” segregation coefficient “, and in the case of most crystal growth processes, and most difficult to remove contaminants, the segregation coefficients are such as to highly favor the liquid phase over the solid phase for the impurities to go.
The result is that the vast majority of common contaminants are highly rejected from the growing solid phase, resulting in the solid being much more pure that the liquid. As the crystal grows, the melt will of course become more and more contaminated, and usually the result is a sort of floating ” slag ” forms on the melt, which can be physically skimmed off, and rejected, or reprocessed elsewhere.
The melting and recrystallization process can be repeated several times , each time resulting in a further purification of the silicon.
In the case of diamond and silicon, and germanium, the crystal structure is so compact compared to the liquid phase, that impurity atoms, particularly larger ones are highly rejected by the lattice growing process; they just don’t fit so they ” drop off ”
It is simply Henry’s law at a liquid solid interface, rather than a liquid gaseous interface.
Exactly the same thing happens when sea ice melts and re-freezes.
Both gas impurities, such as CO2, and solid impurities such as NaCl are highly rejected by the segregation coefficients for those molecules when the ocean water freezes, so CO2 is expelled into the water, and then into the air in keeping with Henry’s law, and so is all the salt so the ice is fresh water ice (maybe with liquid brine inclusions.).
When we recycled our gallium, which is a liquid at near room Temperatures, we used chemical cleaning, using both organic solvents, and acid type solvents to remove most of the impurities, but the major purification step was the gradient freeing process, where the liquid is cooled in a vessel with a Temperature gradient along it, and as the Temperature is dropped, the freezing interface moves along the material sweeping the impurities in front of it, so they remain in the liquid phase.
You could probably purify molten aluminum (in an inert atmosphere) with a gradient freeze process, because the segregation process, isn’t limited to single crystal growth.
In any case it is a very inefficient learning process, to assume that what you know about one subject can be simply transported to a different subject, because most of those assumptions will be wrong.
That is why we don’t teach mathematics in an English language class, because they aren’t even vaguely similar.
Nor are the properties of our 92 elements.
So don’t try extrapolating rusting iron in sea water, and trying the same process on say Lithium or Potassium; you are likely to get some surprises if you try that.
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If you want to believe that I just make all this stuff up; that’s ok with me; I don’t care.
But I do care, if your ignorance, gets in the way of somebody else’s attempt to learn something.
And, I shouldn’t need to repeat: ” Ignorance is NOT a disease; we are all born with it. But stupidity has to be taught, and there are many willing and able to teach it. ”
So try doing a little research on your own, before you assume that I’m just making stuff up.
And I don’t have to Giggle it or Wikipate it. I’ve already lived it, for more than half a century.
I thought that name was familiar….. http://abc13.com/news/four-workers-injured-in-pasadena-plant-blast-fire/1013167/