BP Solar Closes Thin Film Operations [RE-wrenches]

[Joel Davidson]

Some of you may remember that Solarex sued APS (former owner of the
Fairfield, CA building that BP now occupies) and sued Siemens Solar and sued
Utility Power Group (Mike Stern's amorphous PV company) for infringing on an
old RCA amorphous silicon PV patent that Solarex had licensed. Solarex won
the law suit, forced those three companies to shut down their aSi operations
and then started pushing Millennium Modules thanks to the $0.75/W subsidy
that Virginia gave to them.

Jeff Yago wrote:

> Since I live  about 40 miles from the BP plant in Virginia that is
> closing, let my provide some background that was not in the news.
>
> This was a new plant from the ground up including building, machinery,
> everything.  They had this about as automated as you can get, with
> computer controlled glass plating line, laser cell etching, etc.  The
> only manual operation I saw was attaching the wiring leads to the
> back.
>
> Virginia offered lots of tax and business incentives to get Solorex
> (BP) them to move here in the first place as several states were in
> the competition.  Virginia also funded a program with about $4.00/watt
> buy down for all large in state commercial and institutional sales.
>
> What nobody has mentioned yet, is what about all the lost tax revenue
> that they benefited from and then packed up and left town?  There were
> a lot of dedicated employees here that were really trying to make it a
> go.  My guess is somebody will soon realize Virginia got the short end
> of the stick and will try to recover some of these losses.
>
> Jeff Yago
> Richmond Virginia
>
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