It was quite the flashy week in the world of solar.
First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR) kicked things off
with an announcement that it's
going to China. The firm is looking to build a massive
2-gigawatt power plant in Inner Mongolia that will take about
a decade to complete.
Also early in the week,
Trina Solar (NYSE: TSL) landed a large loan
to finance a 500 megawatt capacity expansion (what, me worry
about industry oversupply?),
Solarfun Power (Nasdaq: SOLF) trotted out a
letter of intent on 600 megawatts' worth of projects (also in
sunny Inner Mongolia), and shares of
Energy Conversion Devices (Nasdaq: ENER)
soared on the rumor of a buyout by
Applied Materials . Somehow, the stock has
more or less clung to these gains all week. I say take the
money and run.
LDK Solar (NYSE: LDK), which recently began
polysilicon production at its in-house plant, announced that
it will collaborate with Best Solar on future solar projects.
That's no surprise, given their common controlling owner.
I'll go out on a limb and predict a merger between these
companies sometime in the next year or two.
Nanosolar , a thin film startup that we've
followed with interest for
quite a whilenow, made a series of announcements on
Wednesday. The firm's got its German factory up and running,
with a nameplate capacity of 640 megawatts (though it's only
spitting out one megawatt/month at present). Nanosolar also
provided a few more details about its panels, which are
certified at a higher system voltage than any other out
there, and have been independently verified at 16.4%
efficiency in the lab. Median efficiency in production is
running above 11%.
Rounding out the week that was,
Canadian Solar made further inroads into the
South Korean market in a deal with the LG Group, solar
thermal bigwig BrightSource brought in Bechtel as both a
contractor and an equity investor on its 440MW Ivanpah
facility in California, and
Evergreen Solar (Nasdaq: ESLR) launched a
line of off-grid solar panels. The company identified this as
an "expanding market," but didn't bother to quantify the
potential. The market for blankets with sleeves is also
expanding, but there's only so much Snuggie demand.
Out of that trio of solar firms, Brightsource is probably
the best bet. You can't invest in it yet, but
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG),
BP , and
Chevron already have.
This article was originally published as
This Week in Solaron
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