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Solon Corporation to Close Tucson Solar Panel Factory

by on Aug. 16, 2011, under Solar

Amidst declining prices for solar panels, German solar manufacturer Solon Corporation will close their Tucson manufacturing facility and cut 60 jobs. They will focus instead on solar project development.

From CNET Green Tech:

Solar manufacturer Solon said yesterday it will close a solar panel factory in Arizona in response to intense global competition on prices.

The Germany-based company said it will phase out a Tucson panel facility by October, cutting 60 jobs in the process. Instead, Solon will focus its product development efforts on designing and building large-scale solar installations using panels from different makers.

“We regret the near-term impact of this business decision on our employees and the Tucson community, but as a company Solon is adapting to a rapidly changing solar market,” Dan Alcombright, CEO of Solon North America, said in a statement. Solon also plans to cut 15 percent of its workforce in Germany, according to reports.

Solon’s decision to get out of solar panel manufacturing in the U.S. follows the announcement yesterday from Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Evergreen Solar, once a promising manufacturer with unique technology, decided to get out of the solar panel business as well to focus on making silicon wafers, a building block of solar panels.

The Solon Corporation news release about the plant closing is here.

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Solar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • Mark

    The referenced article says:
    Solar manufacturer Solon said yesterday it will close a solar panel factory in Arizona in response to intense global competition on prices.
    Intense global competition on prices, eh.  Translated, this means that no one is buying the damned things, so everyone is cutting prices.  Sorry, but even in Tucson, solar still cannot compete on a cost basis with natural gas and coal based electricity.  The ROE is just not there.
    And, as the curtain is being pulled back from the CO2 hysteria, the morality-based reason to buy these products is going away too.  All that is left is the elimination of the government subsidies, and it will be fully kaput.
    And it will rise again as technology gets better, and the market costs for fossil fuels becomes high enough that this technology WILL be able to compete on a cost basis.  My guess if 50 years out.

    • Fraser007

      Well, so much for Tucson being the solar capitol of the USA.

    • usmctrucker

      The problem isn’t the technology and cost of the panels entirely; there are residential sized panels that can make electricity during a full moon, it’s that the battery technology hasn’t kept up to store what they produce to be used during peak usage times.  All that juice just bleeds back into the grid when you’re not home. 

      Also, utility companies used to offer rebates if unused solar electricity made your meter run backwards, at least in San Diego they did.  It even made CNN twenty years ago.  Funny how that never took off here.  Or how it didn’t survive the bankruptcy of PSE&G.  State and local governments are too incestuous with “public/private” utilities to make this work.  And to make it work on your own, you need a large shed, or a basement, full of VERY heavy batteries and the know-how to wire them.  I’ve seen it done and I can tell you most people don’t have the attention span or dedication to do it, even if they can afford it.

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