Lessons from the Evergreen Solar Bankruptcy

According to CNET.com’s Martin LaMonica, the recent bankruptcy of solar panel manufacturer Evergreen Solar offers an important lesson for those in rapidly developing green industries: don’t try to do everything yourself. The company, which in 2008 had a patent on making silicon solar wafers more cheaply than anyone else, eventually found that its own proprietary processes kept it from being able to outsource steps in the manufacturing process to other manufacturers (particularly in China) who could perform them at less cost. With costs in solar manufacturing rapidly decreasing over the past three years, eventually Evergreen simply couldn’t compete.