The Evergreen Solar story keeps getting worse. The Marlboro, MA-based solar technology company revealed today that it is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. The court documents were not available online today, but other media outlets have reported that Evergreen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ESLR]]), with assets of $424.5 million, owed its roughly 5,000 creditors $485.6 million.
Evergreen said it will cut another 65 jobs across the U.S. and Europe and suspend activities at its Midland, MI facility as part of its restructuring. That’s on top of the 800 workers Evergreen cut earlier this year when it shut down its Devens, MA plant. (The company had previously received grants and loans from the state of Massachusetts surrounding the Devens site.) Evergreen said in the release today that it will now be focusing more on producing solar wafer technology for other companies to use in solar cell and module products. As part of the shift, Evergreen will have about 85 workers in its Wuhan, China site focused on the wafer development.
“Since January, Evergreen Solar has been aggressively repositioning itself to fully leverage the potential our String Ribbon wafers can bring to high volume solar cell and module manufacturers as these customers are facing severe pressure to further reduce their total cost of manufacturing and particularly their wafer supply costs. The actions we are taking today enable the continued development of an industry standard wafer using Evergreen’s differentiated technology and thereby provide the lowest cost wafer to the growing solar industry,” Evergreen Solar president and CEO Michael El-Hillow said in the release today.
