From the courtroom to the board room, here's a roundup of this week's action in the solar power space.
On Monday, Wal-Mart
Late last year, LDK Solar
One discrepancy I noticed in the firms' respective press releases is that while LDK continues to refer to the money in question as a prepayment, Q-Cells refers to it as a loan that was "originally an advance payment for raw material supplies." The latter categorization implies that Q-Cells didn't get much for its money.
On the R&D front, LDK entered into a collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, one of the Department of Energy's research labs. The pair will be sleuthing out various silicon-related solutions.
The biggest news I spotted this week was the acquisition of Recurrent Energy by Sharp. Recurrent has been on the auction block for a while, and I've worried aloud that Suntech Power
Sharp's debt-to-EBITDA ratio is half the level of Suntech's, and the firm is likely in a much better financial position to make this acquisition work. Sharp can now better go head to head against firms such as First Solar and SunPower