Solarcity which is the largest US Solar Installer has got sued by Sunpower for stealing trade secrets. Note Sunpower which was recently bought by French Oil Giant Total is facing tough times. Sunpower which makes the most efficient solar panels in the world is facing tough competition from super cheap Chinese solar panels. In fact according to Total CEO the company would have been already bankrupt with Total support. Beside making solar panels, Sunpower is also one of the biggest solar integrators and developers. The company has been in the business of installing solar panels after it acquired solar system installer Powerlight.
The US Import Sanctions on Chinese Solar Panel imports will become a non-event soon as Chinese solar panel producers are easily short circuting the sanctions. They are using a number of strategies to protect themselves from the upcoming duties and anti-dumping measures. This shows that globalization makes the use of specific duties on a nation quite useless and only benefits the lawyers . The reason is that private companies are much more faster and nimble compared to the slow moving bureaucrats .
Solar Prices have now reached grid parity in various places in the world without a lot of people realizing it. In countries like Brazil and Italy, Solar Energy Electricity price is already lower than the Retail Price of Electricity. So it is on most islands in the world like i,Caribbean and elsewhere. These islands which are mostly powered by dirty diesel generators are seeing rapid deployments of solar power. In fact Hawaii is already getting saturated with solar . However the Achilles heed of Solar Energy that is the lack of continuous power is starting to bite.
The relentless rise of Chinese telecom equipment and OEM companies has massacared telecom jobs in the West with major companies like Nokia, Alcatel and others firing in the thousands. Note Huawei and ZTE have become the nemisis of the telecom equipment makers which are showing losses in the last few years. These companies are not managing to compete with the low cost engineer advantage of the Chinese firms . Nokia is also firing thousands in its western factories in Poland and other places as it moves production to Asian factories. Note while Nokia has become unprofitable to other causes like Apple and Android, low cost phones from Asia is the biggest factor in its demise as well.
Now Car Bombs have been used against Israel’s Diplomatic Personnel in Georgia and India. While the bomb in Geogia was diffused by the action of alert guards in Tbilsi, the one in India went off. Note India is a very susceptible country when it comes to terrorist attacks. The Bombay blasts when a number of Israelis were killed took place only 2-3 years ago. Now again an Innova SUV from Toyota was targeted in one of the most secure areas of India’s capital Delhi. Note this attack could have been done by numerous organizations like Al-Qaeda, Pakistan based terrorist groups or even some of the Iran sympathetic groups.
However it has now thankfully put its plan on hold of spending another 520 million euros on solar energy. The company has already wrote down $1 billion in solar after the valuations of Ersol and Aleo have crashed from the time it bought it. Note most Western solar companies are going bankrupt as they can’t compete with the 80c/watt solar panel prices. Stalwarts Q-Cells are defaulting on the debt payments while according to Total CEO, Sunpower would have been bankrupt if they had not bought it. Even the biggest US Solar Panel Company First Solar has been ravaged by the price war. Bosch has bravely said that it would continue to remain in the solar panel market while it makes more sense for them now to make an exit and concentrate on their core competencies. It can realistically never hope to get into the top 20 solar panel suppliers and stop spending good money after the bad.