Kill Any Hopes for an 11th Hour Resurrection of Evergreen Solar in the U.S.

I thought I had written my last piece on Evergreen Solar when it filed for bankruptcy in August. Perhaps this one will truly be the last.

On October 11, Hilco Industrial, a company that provides industrial capital asset acquisition and disposition services, announced that a bankruptcy judge has granted the company permission to auction off Evergreen Solar’s plant, equipment, and real estate in Michigan and Devens, Massachusetts. This auction puts the nails in the coffin of any hopes that Evergreen could somehow salvage its U.S. business through the bankruptcy process. All that will be left is the plant in China and a pile of intellectual property. Again, I am suspecting that Evergreen will somehow get resurrected as some kind of Chinese entity.

Here is the text from Hilco’s announcement:

“The United States Bankruptcy Court has appointed Hilco Industrial as the exclusive agent to conduct the sale of Evergreen Solar PV Solar Panel Facility. Topping $425M (US) to originally develop in 2009, Evergreen Solar has perfected Wafer, Solar Cell, and Solar Panel production to an unsurpassed level of efficiency. These assets are housed in a state of the art facility designed specifically for these products with redundancy of services to ensure 100% uptime. Representing 10% of US capacity, this facility operates at 180 MW/yr (rated at 160 MW/yr.) which can translate into a dramatically reduced cost/watt for manufacturing.

A final bid-off for qualifying bidders will take place on November 1, 2011. Specific bulk lots, qualifying requirements, bid instructions, and all required documentations can be found herein.”

The sale will happen quickly from the time of this notice. This fact is highlighted by the red, bold text announcing “SHORT NOTICE SALE!” on the web site. I can only imagine the urgency of the sale is related to the dire financial condition of the company. I will be interested in finding out the eventual owner(s) of the various pieces of Evergreen Solar’s property in the U.S.

Be careful out there!

Full disclosure: no positions (stock worthless)

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