Evergreen Solar (Nasdaq: ESLR) kicked off the week with an announcement of record shipments in the first quarter. That sounded pretty good, until you looked at the quantities and costs involved. At barely more than 35 megawatts (MW) shipped, Evergreen remains a decidedly minor player in the global solar space. Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) prepared investors for shipments of around 190 megawatts this quarter. Trina Solar's (NYSE: TSL) guidance also stands at 180 to 190 MW.

Evergreen's costs are running at more than $2 per watt, which just doesn't cut it these days. Photon Consulting says the industry's average crystalline silicon PV module cost is running around $1.67 today. Evergreen's Chinese manufacturing operations are poised for a mid-year commercial launch, which should help bring costs to a more competitive level, but I continue to fear that it's too little, too late for this old timer. Despite my concerns, someone out there is still willing to throw more money at this company, with Evergreen placing $165 million of 13% convertible notes later in the week.

Several firms came out with forecasts for 2010 global solar installations over the past week. Gartman sees a range of 8 to 10 gigawatts (GW), Barclays is calling for 11GW, and iSuppli projects 13.6GW installed. Worldwide PV installations last year came in around 7.2GW, so iSuppli is really sticking its neck out on this one.

On Tuesday, Canadian Solar preannounced its results, and surprised some people by the magnitude of its euro foreign exchange losses. Some analysts, like Mark Bachman, foresaw this issue, but Canadian Solar's projected gross margins of 13% to 13.5% undercut even those cautious analysts' low expectations. Canadian Solar shares are down around 17% on the week.

On Wednesday, concentrating PV player Amonix raised $129 million in additional venture capital. The solar developer has been around since 1989, making the company almost as old as SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWRA)(Nasdaq: SPWRB), which just observed its 25th anniversary this week. Whether we'll see a publicly traded Amonix in the relatively near-term may depend in part on how well Solyndra's planned IPO is received.

Wrapping up the week was an announcement by SunPower that it's partnering with Flextronics (Nasdaq: FLEX) to manufacture panels right in its home state of California. The target production line is 75MW per year, which is a pretty modest addition to SunPower's global footprint. The company also hit a fresh 52-week low this week. How's that for an anniversary gift?