Unconfirmed by the company but heard from several always-reliable sources, solar financier Sunrun's most recent $60 million funding raise was at a valuation north of $1 billion.
Sungevity, another solar financier, is also on the hunt for funding. Because both of these firms must maintain sponsorship equity in all of their installations, working capital gets burned fairly quickly. Downstream solar is a bright spot in the solar industry, but it's still a horse race in a capital-intensive, difficult-to-scale business.
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General Electric has recalibrated its schedule for production of cadmium telluride (CdTe) panels at its Colorado factory. Despite rumors to the contrary, a spokesperson for the firm told GTM that GE remains firmly committed to solar panel production and the plan is to revamp the (PrimeStar) solar production process to produce 15-percent-efficiency panels in eighteen months.
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Solar balance-of-system (BoS) startup eIQ, a vendor of parallel DC electronics and cabling solutions, is rumored to be ratcheting down operations and trimming staff as it tries to survive and raise cash. We await comment from the firm.
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Utility-scale inverter maker Satcon recently announced a 1-for-8 reverse stock split of its common stock effective on July 19, 2012. The stock split might address the firm's current $0.19 per share price and get that figure over $1.00 per share. In any case, the firm has a market cap of $29.5 million, and that makes it a very micro-cap stock. Despite these foreboding issues, the firm cites its number-one ranking in North America in both the utility scale and and large scale spaces, according to new IMS figures.
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Utility giant NRG will continue its own residential solar platform, despite Suncap's departure.
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Faced with painfully high electricity prices on the the big island of Hawaii, consumers are withdrawing from the grid "in droves," according to a presenter at Intersolar. The price of solar panels combined with battery storage is a lot easier to justify when kilowatt-hour pricing is $0.25 to $0.35.
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Ron Kenedi, a solar industry veteran, had this to say with regards to China and the U.S. competing in solar: "We're competing for profits; they're competing for jobs."