Friday, November 06, 2009 at 11:05:23 AM - by Jeanne Roberts

On July 16, 2008, Evergreen Solar opened its Fort Devens, Massachusetts 450,000-square-foot manufacturing facility. It was the first phase in a plan to ramp up toward greater solar panel production, with a second phase scheduled for completion in March of 2009.

The company won $44 million in state incentives (and another reported $32 million in grants, land, loans, tax incentives, and other aid) to build its manufacturing plant. In February of 2008, before the plant was announced, it had scaled back its IPO from 20 million shares to 16. A little more than a year later, on the announcement of more than $1 billion in new contracts with Germany's IBC Solar AG, those shares shot up 33 percent.

In the beginning, Evergreen said it would will eventually employ 700 in the plant (many of them transferred from the Marlboro pilot facility) and produce more than 780,000 solar panels a year. It also expected to take a 2008 $25-million loss due to relocation and severance fees and the closure of its pilot site.

In April of this year, the company announced an agreement with Chinese company Jiawei Solar (Wuhan) Co. to manufacture the companies proprietary String Ribbon wafers at a leased Jiawei facility at the Wuhan Donghu New Technology Development Zone in Wuhan, but most regarded the move as an expansion.

Instead, Devens’ manufacturing is being cut back, and parts of the plant closed. Evergreen has not said how many of the Devens’ jobs will disappear, but it’s a bleak day for Massachusetts and Governor Deval Patrick, who instigated the whole thing. The move is being cited as a cost-cutting measure; Evergreen stock, which peaked at $19 in 2007, was priced at $1.00 on November 5. The Devens site will reportedly continue to manufacture wafers and cells, but panel assembly will relocate to China.

This is what 3M, a Minnesota company, said to the state in 2009. Currently, 3M Minnesota employees number only about 6,400 out of a total of 79,000 worldwide.

Evergreen company officials insist that they “remain committed to their investment in Massachusetts”. Marlboro is still the company’s headquarters and houses R&D facilities. However, the pledge the company made to the state in 2008 – that it would add 350 new jobs – is likely to default on about the same scale as its $40-million writeoff for equipment at the Devens’ site as a result of the production shift to China.

Evergreen Solar, once described as the “poster child” of the state’s burgeoning solar economy, is now the poster child of lost dreams, and Ian Bowles, Massachusetts's top environmental official, has expressed his disappointment, saying that he will nonetheless “work hard to make sure the company protects the maximum number of jobs in our state”.