One of the big concepts for the future of the United States is the "Green Economy" and all of the "Green Jobs" it will create. There's no doubt that there is some truth in this. The number of people involved in solar energy, wind power, building efficiencies in homes and vehicles are all growing. So the Green Economy is coming to pass. But there are a few glitches along the way.
Evergreen Solar caused a glitch in that program recently. The company announced their 3rd quarter earnings recently, where they had a big write-down of a joint venture. But the ongoing numbers were impressive, like the fact that Evergreen Solar's revenue more than tripled to almost $78 million. And their gross margin on sales rose almost 10 percent.
Not bad. Especially in a solar market that has a lot of companies losing sales, losing contracts and generally not performing very well. Evergreen is a smaller operator, but a quality company as the numbers show.
However, the company made another announcement on the same day. Their major production center is moving to China. This created a lot of noise in Massachusetts about the loss of these green jobs. With the solar panel assembly heading to China, this makes one wonder about the future of all the promised renewable energy careers. You can read the article about the loss of jobs written by the Boson Globe but do we really need to break it down?
How much longer will it be before other US solar panel manufacturers decide to pull up the stakes in the US, realize they can produce the same products for 80% less cost, and move to China. The situation seems no different for solar panel production than for other electronics or mechnical devices manufacturing, where the constant question is...why does a company want to hire a high paid US worker, adhere to the labor codes of the US, pay the various taxes associated with doing business in the US and maintain an environmentally acceptable production facility that abides by to EPA codes?
Let's watch to see if this starts a trend towards the outsourcing of most (or perhaps) all of the production of solar panels to Asia. After all, does any company manufacture TV's in the United States? Most of the cellular phone production is gone. There is no reason to believe that future solar panel production will not move as well.
It's just more ironic (and maybe a little more troubling) considering that part of America's future was to built on the green economy.
