Monday, October 10, 2011

Evergreen Solar assets head to auction

By James M. Connolly

The star manufacturing facility for troubled Evergreen Solar Inc. — the $425 million plant at Devens — is hitting the auction block, along with the company’s inventory of solar panels and another plant in Midland, Mich.

Hilco Industrial LLC, an asset acquisition and disposal firm based in Farmington Hills, Mich., said today that it has been appointed by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to auction off some of the manufacturing assets of solar panels manufacturer Evergreen. In August, Evergreen filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a period of rapid growth was punctuated by a drop in sales in the face of cost-cutting by Chinese competitors and sluggish global demand for photovoltaic panels.

The Devens facility was the gem in Evergreen’s public image during the good times, but was one of the first areas where the company cut back when sales slowed, losses grew and layoffs of 800 employees accompanied closing of the plant in March.

The Midland plant was closed in the wake of the bankruptcy filing.

Hilco, which is managing more than a dozen auctions of assets from various companies, termed the Devens plant a state of the art PV manufacturing facility built for more than $425 million , just over a year before the first warning signs came out of Evergreen with the announcement that the company saw its future growth occuring in China, not in the U.S. 

Hilco went on to say of the Devens plant, “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.”

Now, Hilco is accepting written bids for the plant and its equipment until Oct. 26, with the final auction taking place on Nov. 1.

The auction will put up for sale the Devens and Midland buildings, equipment such as wafer, panel and cell fabrication machinery, materials and existing panel inventories.

Hilco’s announcement doesn’t discuss the disposition of assets at other Evergreen locations, including the Marlborough headquarters, and locations in Germany and China.

At the time of its Chapter 11 filing, Evergreen listed assets of $424.5 million, and said that it owed creditors $485.6 million.