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December 05, 2000
Evergreen Solar Goes Public
Evergreen becomes the second U.S.-owned, publicly traded solar energy product company.
SocialFunds.com --
Last month, Evergreen Solar, Inc. announced an initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock.
It now joins AstroPower as the only publicly traded U.S. companies with products exclusively
related to solar energy.
 Wall Street has responded favorably this
year to companies focused on alternative energy products, such as solar power and fuel cells, in
the face of a NASDAQ market that has lost nearly half its value. AstroPower has risen from $15 per
share at the beginning of the year to more than $60 per share and closing yesterday at just under
$34/share.
The benefits of using solar energy to generate electricity are well known.
There is no emission of carbon dioxide or pollution in the generation process, and the sun provides
the fuel. However, even though great strides have been made in terms of cost reductions, it is
still expensive relative to conventional fossil fuel power generation.
Evergreen produces
photovoltaic (PV) modules, which are the panels that collect the sun's energy and convert it to
electricity. PV modules contain cells that are made of special materials called semiconductors.
Silicon is the most common semiconductor used in PV modules.
Conventional modules are made
from slicing solid blocks of very expensive pure silicon. The slicing inevitably produces waste.
Evergreen's competitive edge comes from a proprietary technology, called String Ribbon, developed
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It enables the fabrication of solar panel without
slicing, thereby using less silicon to produce comparable modules.
The key market for the
solar industry currently is off-grid power demand. The grid is the interconnected networks of power
lines. Off-grid demand is usually in remote areas where the cost of a solar system is cheaper than
running a line from the grid to the demand point. Examples of off-grid power demand include remote
homes in sparsely populated areas, remote traffic signals and highway call boxes. For these uses,
the power demand is not so high, but it needs to be reliable.
AstroPower, headquartered in
Newark, Delaware, is similar to Evergreen in that it has innovative technology that lowers
production costs. In AstroPower's case, it is the ability to use recycled semiconductor wafers in
making single crystal silicon solar cells. This allows the company to realize a significant cost
advantage over its competition by avoiding the high expense of growing, slicing and preparing
silicon ingot-grown wafers.
Recently some small companies have postponed their planned
IPOs due to current market conditions. Evergreen decided to carry out its IPO because it had
finished the pilot phase of development, and was ready to move toward commercial growth.
Evergreen's 3,000,000 shares had an initial offering price of $14 per share. The NASDAQ was fairly
tumultuous in November; Evergreen's stock price at the close of December 5 was $6 7/8.
Social investors looking to establish a position exclusively in the solar industry now have a
choice between Evergreen and AstroPower. While homeowners may grumble when heating costs rise,
fossil fuel price increases help solar technology become more competitive. Both companies appear to
be expanding in order to take advantage of the increasing demand for solar products.
©
SRI World Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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