Doug Neeper's Blog

DFN: Parts of Solar Millennium AG are being sold off by insolvency admin. Biggest assets still remains, Blythe, Palen and Amargosa. The Blythe development was fully permitted and ready to start construction. Someone will come in
and purchase these properties to jump start their development activities. To be fair, Blythe is fully permitted using CSP technology, and if ‘you’ wanted to use a different technology, say PV, you would have to go through the permitting process again. One would thing that this would shorten the normal permitting cycle.

Insolvency admin sells parts of Solar Millennium
Fri Mar 16, 2012 5:39am EDT

(Reuters) – Parts of Solar Millennium, a German solar company that filed for insolvency in December, have been sold to investors by its insolvency administrator, the group said on Friday.
Schoeller Renewables, owned by German industrialist family Schoeller, has bought Solar Millennium’s 50 percent stake in PV Power Holding GmbH, which develops photovoltaic (PV) projects in Italy.
In addition, Concord Blue Engineering, a Germany-based company active in the biomass sector, has bought Solar Millennium’s holding of about 75 percent in Blue Tower, which markets technology to extract carbon-neutral gas trough the decomposition of biomass.
"The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price of the two disposals," Solar Millennium said in a statement.
Solar Millennium was one of two major German solar companies to file for insolvency last December, after running out of cash before it was able to finalize deals to sell large projects in the United States and Spain.
German solar module maker Solon also filed for insolvency that month.
Solar companies in Europe and the United States have been hit hard by a toxic mix of oversupply, falling prices, low-cost Asian competition and lower government subsidies on which the industry still depends.
This has already triggered a wave of bankruptcies in the United States, most notably panel maker Solyndra LLC and Evergreen Solar. (Reporting by Christoph Steitz; Editing by Mark Potter)

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DFN: Solar Millennium AG went into insolvency (German equivalent of bankruptcy). Solar Hybrid AG was trying to buy Solar Millennium LLC, Solar Hybrid
went into insolvency. Lesson learned? Very challenging for thinly capitalized companies (sub 100M network worth) to pull off multi-billion dollar deals.

Reuters: UPDATE 1-Solarhybrid says to file for insolvency
Tue Mar 20, 2012 3:43pm EDT

FRANKFURT, MARCH 20 – German solar project developer solarhybrid AG said on Tuesday it will open insolvency proceedings with a German court.
It said it was filing for insolvency "due to illiquidity" with the court in Arnsberg. No other details were given in a statement issued late on Tuesday.
In December, Solar Millennium AG filed for insolvency after running out of cash before it was able to finalize deals to sell large projects in the United States and Spain.
German solar module marker Solon SE also filed for insolvency in December.
Solar companies in Europe and the United States have been hit hard by a toxic mix of oversupply, falling prices, low-cost Asian competition and lower government subsidies on which the industry still depends.
This has already triggered a wave of bankruptcies in the United States, most notably panel maker Solyndra LLC and Evergreen Solar Inc.
On Feb. 6, solarhybrid said its supervisory board and the interim insolvency administrator of Solar Millenium had reached an agreement under which solarhybrid would acquire the 2.25 gigawatts U.S. project pipeline from Solar Millenium.

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