Sharp paid 305 million in cash for San Francisco-based Recurrent in 2010. Back then, the Japanese electronics and solar panel maker wanted to gain a foothold in the solar project development business in North America.
But Sharp has been restructuring its overall business since suffering big losses in 2011 and 2012, and it's decided to shrink the solar manufacturing and project development operations because of their high initial startup costs, the company said in a press release Tuesday.
The decision to sell Recurrent came because "the development business needs sufficient funds for initial development costs, and its profits are highly variable," the company said.
Sharp said it's also gotten out of solar power project business and ended a solar panel joint venture in Europe. But it hasn't given up on solar cell manufacturing and refresh its solar energy equipment sales by coming up with different designs. Sharp is among the top 10 solar panel makers in the world.
When Sharp bought Recurrent, Recurrent was developing 2 gigawatts of projects, including 330 megawatts that had contracts to deliver the energy to utilities. Now it will bring over 4 gigawatts of projects under development to Canadian Solar, with roughly 1 gigawatt of them in the "late stage" of development.
There isn't an industrywide metric for defining projects in various stages of development. The 1 gigawatt of late-stage projects refer to those with utility contracts, said Cate Powers, a Recurrent spokeswoman. Those projects include 200 megawatts to be delivered to Austin Energy, 206 megawatts to Southern California Edison, and 70 megawatts to Sonoma Clean Power in California, Powers said.
Reference: greenenergychoice.blogspot.com
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