EGN NEWS DESK
The historical past of a homegrown photo voltaic large
Founded by Richard Swanson in Silicon Valley in 1985, SunPower first distinguished itself with world-record photo voltaic cell efficiency — a technical edge that Maxeon maintains at this time.
When the agency confronted monetary issues in 2001, Rodgers, a Silicon Valley semiconductor legend and former classmate of Swanson’s, rescued the corporate with a test for $750,000. It turned out to be one of many higher investments in enterprise capital historical past; SunPower went public in 2005 and shortly reached a multibillion-dollar market capitalization.
In 2006, the agency acquired PowerLight, a Berkeley, California–based mostly photo voltaic system designer and installer, for $332 million in money and inventory. The acquisition, finalized in 2007, basically set off the primary wave of large-scale photo voltaic installations within the nation. SunPower, together with First Solar, was one of many first photo voltaic panel producers to pursue utility-scale initiatives and develop its personal photo voltaic farms.
Years later, the monetary woes returned, pushed by China’s race to decrease prices and the issue of constructing SunPower’s higher-end photo voltaic panels. In 2011, French oil and fuel main Total purchased a majority possession stake in SunPower and sought to offer some measure of monetary stability within the perennially bumpy trade, which had come to be nicknamed the “photo voltaic coaster.”
But that monetary stability by no means fairly materialized. Throughout the 2010s, as photo voltaic plummeted in worth and started to realize steam within the U.S., the agency floundered. Its expertise prices weren’t falling as quick as these of the standard photo voltaic panels mass-produced in China, and opponents equivalent to Sunrun and Sunnova have been elbowing it out of the residential rooftop market.
By the beginning of this decade, when rates of interest soared and California, the most important rooftop photo voltaic market within the U.S., slashed its rooftop photo voltaic incentives, the agency was in no place to climate the storm. It misplaced $227 million final 12 months.
The mud remains to be settling after SunPower’s fall, and far stays unclear. Perhaps Rodgers, alongside Doerr, will be capable to but once more breathe new life into the agency’s belongings by way of Complete Solaria. But what’s clear at this level is that the corporate’s legacy will dwell on within the folks, firms, and applied sciences it has influenced — and within the ongoing clear vitality transition it helped spawn.
