This Week in Solar

By Toby Shute | More Articles
February 12, 2010 | Comments (3)

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French nuclear giant Areva kicked off an eventful week in the sector with an acquisition of U.S. concentrated solar power (CSP) player Ausra. This follows Siemens' (NYSE: SI ) investments in Archimede and Solel last year, underscoring the attractiveness of solar thermal, as opposed to solar photovoltaics, for some serious heavy hitters in the power market. Areva says it "intends to become the world leader in the CSP market." Join the club, bub.

Elsewhere on Monday, Suntech Power's (NYSE: STP ) chief strategy officer told Reuters that he expects polysilicon prices to fall to a range of $35 to $40 per kilogram, down from around $55 per kg. That's around where manufacturing costs stood for the world's leading poly players last summer! Apparently, a bunch of startups are pumping out some decent poly. That arguably erodes too-big-to-fail LDK Solar's (NYSE: LDK ) in-house production advantage, which once appeared so promising.

On Tuesday, talk emerged out of Germany that the powers that be may push back feed-in tariff reductions to June from April, which would give developers some breathing room. Here in the U.S., two solar stocks revealed their rather sorry state of affairs.

On Wednesday, Europe's REC issued another gloomy earnings report. Not only did the company have a bum fourth quarter, but the first quarter looks rough as well, with a 20% sequential decline in wafer prices. Higher-cost solar players are plainly taking it on the chin from Asian rivals.

Speaking of which, both JA Solar (Nasdaq: JASO ) and ReneSola (NYSE: SOL ) made a splash on Thursday. JA Solar reported a booming fourth quarter, while ReneSola snagged a multiyear, 600-megawatt module supply deal. Looking at these releases in isolation, you'd never know times were so tough elsewhere in the sector.

SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWRA ) didn't let these guys entirely steal the spotlight, though. Taking a page from the First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR ) playbook, the stateside solar player picked up SunRay and its 1.2- gigawatt solar development pipeline. The company shelled out $235 million in cash, which is quite a significant chunk relative to the $472 million on hand as of Sept. 27. Is this a proactive move, or one of desperation to secure end-market demand? Sound off in the comments section below.

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First Solar and Suntech Power Holdings are Motley Fool Rule Breakers picks. Try any of our Foolish newsletters today, free for 30 days.

Fool contributor Toby Shute doesn't have a position in any company mentioned. Check out his Motley Fool CAPS profile or follow his articles using Twitter or RSS. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Help us keep this a respectfully Foolish area! This is a place for our readers to discuss, debate, and learn more about the Foolish investing topic you read about above. Help us keep it clean and safe. If you believe a comment is abusive or otherwise violates our Fool's Rules, please report it via the Report this Comment icon found on every comment.

Report this Comment On February 12, 2010, at 5:59 PM, amanalvi wrote:

Well Spwra is a strond company, even comparing to the solar sector get the setback from germany biggest 2009, if we look closely to spwra, its revenue count less than 9% from germany in a sense its less likely to be affected by german subsidy cut and on another hand current accusition will make spwra present in eu market significant and spwra dont need to wait to develop ground network, plus i think margin will increase too. share is been punished by market on accounting error which i believe is overdone.
Report this Comment On February 13, 2010, at 12:30 PM, langco1 wrote:

google the online phone book has become so desparate to maintain its failing status that almost every day it comes out with its own version of its rivals better ideas.google is burning up its money chasing behind other companys but does not even realize you cant get ahead by following! googles founders have seen the writing on the wall and have begun massive sales of their stock holdings...
Report this Comment On February 14, 2010, at 4:08 PM, SUPERMANSTOCKS wrote:

I wrote something about this
http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/ViewPost.aspx?bpid=341688&t=0...

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