Hi everyone,
This is half off-topic, as they weren't making solar collectors for marine applications (yet?), but SillyCon Valley startup Solyndra declared bankruptcy Wednesday, leaving investors out-of-luck on over $1,000,000,000 in seed capital, and taxpayers on the hook for $535,000,000 in government-guaranteed loans. The opening of their shiny, new, high-tech, robotic factory on I-880 in Fremont, California, attracted politicians of all stripes, including President Obama, Secretary of Energy Chu, Governor Schwarzenegger, and others desperate to herald the 1,100 new jobs it brought. However, the company was unable to ramp up production yield and volume of its complex, thin-film, epitaxial-deposition and lithographic-process-based products (which are cylindrical to maximize collector surface area and angles) fast enough to compete with the 70% drop in the cost of conventional photovoltaic solar collectors from Chinese competitors. The Chinese companies have essentially unlimited capital available, funneled through its government, which also greases the skids to ensure that there are no environmental, labor, tax or other roadblocks in the way of factory construction on land confiscated from citizens, slave-labor working conditions/hours, pollution efflux, etc.
It's unclear what this means for the future of Solyndra's technology and production facilities, which will obviously be auctioned off to the highest bidders for a fraction of their cost. If the cost of production is still higher than that of Chinese products, then it has died on the vine already, and the U.S. will have lost yet-another high-growth manufacturing industry in its infancy to China. No private or government investment in this portion of the green technology sector will ever be available, again, and future investments in other green-tech technologies will slow even more than the economy has dictated, lately, even if they're less complex and lower-risk. Most investors and government funding sources simply lack the expertise to adequately evaluate the risks and opportunities of such technologies, since everyone competently knowledgeable about them is trying to develop them.
The bottom line is that this does not bode well for the foreseeable future of solar electric power generation technology production or adoption in the U.S., since the Chinese have succeeded in eliminating a primary competitive threat that might have been able to undercut their offerings over the long run, if it had been capitalized at the much higher level the Chinese government has guaranteed to its companies with no red tape (pun fully intended).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2011/08/31/what-solyndras-bankruptcy-means-for-silicon-valley-solar-startups/
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