Another One Bites The Dust: Solar Millennium Insolvency
Greentech Media
2011 takes with it another casualty of the solar shakeout.
Last week it was Germany’s Solon, which makes solar modules and solar power plants, that was looking to “attempt restructuring via the insolvency court,” in roughly the German equivalent of bankruptcy. Today saw Germany’s Solar Millennium file for the opening of insolvency proceedings, according to a Reuters article.
Solar Millennium has a large 2.25-gigawatt pipeline of solar projects in the U.S. alone, for which it was in advanced discussions with solarhybrid to sell. But the deals did not move fast enough and insolvency was the result.
The flagship U.S. project is the Blythe CSP solar farm, which is in the process of shifting to photovoltaics. It was originally a trough CSP design, which has become an increasingly difficult technology to economically justify. (See the details of the levelized cost of energy reality for trough-based CSP plants in this PDF from GTM Research solar analyst, Brett Prior.)
Solar Millennium has about 235 employees and an $18 million market capitalization.
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