Evergreen Solar Will Close Its Devens Plant

By Curt Nickisch January 11, 2011

BOSTON — A once-promising clean energy company is shutting down its operations in Devens. As a result, 800 people will lose their jobs.

Evergreen Solar Inc. says it can’t compete with China. CEO Michael El-Hillow says solar cell production costs have gotten so low there that the Devens plant is losing money, even though it’s cutting edge.

It was only two-and-a-half years ago that the Marlborough company opened the Devens plant with $58 million of state aid. But a little over a year ago, Evergreen Solar decided it would move part of its manufacturing to a new facility in China. And recently, the company’s losses meant it struggled to stay listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Closing the plant is also a blow to the Patrick administration, which has defended the incentives it gave Evergreen Solar to build in Devens. Economic Development Secretary Greg Bialecki said the administration is disappointed and will work to recover any money Evergreen owes the state.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

Earlier:

Evergreen-To-China Shows It’s Not So Easy To Be Green In Mass.

Andrew Koenigsberg

Its a blow to the Patrick Administration – but its a blow to all of us who worked very, very hard to get the plant up and running in record time and drop costs as fast as we could. When the plant started, we were making panels for over $2 per watt and by the end of the year, we got the costs down to $1.65 per watt. Unfortunatly, prices kept dropping faster. It wasn’t for lack of trying, believe me. But when goverment subsidized chinese contract manufacturers can make panels by hand far cheaper than we can make them using a fully automated process – that’s business.

As long as the U.S. government pays lip service to alternative energy while giving tax breaks and subsidies to big coal, big oil and big agribusiness, companies like Evergreen will never be able to complete.
Nick from Massachusetts

Look, these guys took our tax dollars promising all sorts of jobs for Mass citizens and then packed their bags and moved those jobs to China. WHEN THE STATE GIVES MONEY TO A BUSINESS TO MAKE JOBS – THOSE JOBS SHOULD BE IN MASSACHUSETTS.

So, I am not only not sure what kind of business people they are but do not feel bad that they are going under after they robbed the tax payer.

To me, they broke a promise and knew they would when they took the 58 million in the first place.
David

I trust that the folks at Evergreen did, in fact, make their best effort. I agree with Andrew that we do not have an even playing field in this country for alternative energy industries versus oil and agribusiness. I am extremely disappointed in Evergreen’s decision to close to plant and suggest that should the business thrive in the future, it should make reparations to the state at a high interest rate. I wish them the best of luck. We need to transition to solar and other non-oil-based energy alternatives.
Stirling Kirkbride

What about the American worker and American jobs. The “expert” on NPR was fed softball questions by an uninformed reporter who did not grill them on the dark side of globalization. David Korten’s work is the most incisive on this but Bernard Lietaer is also worth reviewing. Globalization works for Wall Street but not for Main street. Who does NPR represent? Most of the questions seem not to call into question the status quo. Lousy reporting in my opinion; very, very myopic and onesided.
Sheila Leavitt

Edward Glaeser, director of the Rappaport Institute at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was interviewed on WBUR last week about this Evergreen move to China. He contends that Gov. Patrick et al made a mistake in trying to predict the “winners” in the confusing, rapidly-evolving global economy, and that we here in MA would do better to focus on our amazing concentration of brain-power (he used the words “smart” and “smart people” over and over), to emphasize education, and to “get out of the way” of all the brilliant young entrepreneurs who will be attracted here and will shine their collective light over our state’s post-industrial landscape.
I presume that those less intellectually-gifted among us, or those without an “entrepreneurial” bent, should just serve as gardeners and barristers to these brilliant young movers and shakers. Or huddle quietly in our trailers outside 495, dumpster-diving for lunch.
God forbid that we in the U.S. should support Federal government incentives for developers of green energy, including the manufacturers of its components, rather than continue our current policy of underwriting “clean coal” and ethanol-based biofuels, etc. And tobacco. And sugar. And giant polluting hog farms. Etc.
China’s government, of course, provides health care to its citizens, so that manufacturers who move their operations there are not burdened with that cost.
What baloney for Rappaport to assert that MA citizens should just be the shining brains in a jar, and not worry about ever getting our hands dirty actually making anything. What Harvard-0-centric navel-gazing.
D. Strumsky

As a fellow urban economist int he same field as Pr. Glaeser, I generally agree; however, he misses a larger point. We must use our high level of human capital to create higher valued added products for the economy, that is the only path to retaining the current standard of living. The problem is that even is we do that effectively we may still loose if we face competition from other countries that directly or indirectly subsidize the products in a global markets, and frequently illegally copy IP from innovation firms in countries like the US.
Pr. Glaeser would do well to refresh his memory of Nathan Rosenberg’s text Exploring the Black Box, because have seen this before.
Sheila Leavitt

I wrote above, stupidly, that China provides health care to its citizens. I was wrong: China’s citizens get an even lower percentage of their healthcare costs paid by government subsidy than do our own citizens (around 44% or so). ( Outside of urban areas, Chinese people pay out of pocket for most of the health care they receive — if any, although a massive reform aims– they claim– to cover 90% by the end of this year.)

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