BP
NEWS OF THE WEEK
BP SHUTS ITS LAST U.S. SOLAR PLANT MANUFACTURING: Price drop spurs shift to China and India
B
P SOLAR has ceased production of solar cells at its
Frederick, Md., plant and will lay off 320 of the 430 employees there. The move spells the end for BP’s solar cell manufacturing in the U.S. The Frederick closure is part of a restructuring at BP Solar that will shift all photovoltaic manufacturing to its joint venture and contract manufacturing partners. Some of the production work will move to the Xi’an, China, facility of BP SunOasis, a joint venture of BP and Xinjiang SunOasis. BP also has a joint venture with India’s Tata and plans to ramp up capacity at the venture’s plant in Bangalore to 300 MW—about twice the size of the Frederick facility—by 2012. Last March, the company signaled that its commitment to manufacturing crystalline silicon solar cells in developed countries was waning when it closed its photovoltaic module plant in Sydney Olympic Park, in Australia, and said cell manufacturing in Madrid would
TALKING ABOUT GEOENGINEERING CLIMATE INTERVENTION: California
conference calls for research that is responsible and open
T
HE WORLD needs more conversations about
research on geoengineering techniques— carbon sequestration and solar reflection, for example—to prepare for possible action against rapid global warming, an international scientific conference in Pacific Grove, Calif., concluded on March 26. The weeklong Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies called for deliberations among scientists, governments, and the public to ensure that research on the risks, impacts, and efficacy of climate intervention—commonly called geoengineering—is conducted responsibly and transparently. Also, potential consequences of this technology need to be thoroughly understood, the conference organizers say in a statement. “Such discussions should be undertaken with humility and recognition of the threats posed by the rapid increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions,” the statement says. It also affirms that governments will be the decisionmakers on whether
cease. At that time, BP began to phase out module assembly at the Frederick site but said hightech manufacturing of ingots, wafers, and cells would continue. The recent closures were necessitated by a 50% plunge in prices for solar modules since the onset of the world financial crisis in 2008, BP Solar CEO Reyad Fezzani explained during last week’s announcement. To be competitive, he said, BP must “shift to a high-quality, low-cost supply base.” The Frederick closure is not surprising, says Johanna Schmidtke, an analyst at consulting firm Lux Research. “BP is a public version of an overall market trend— large production facilities in the West are going to joint ventures or are being outsourced” to take advantage of cheaper labor, she says. The move does not bode well for the goal of growing “green” manufacturing jobs in the U.S., Schmidtke says. Incentives in the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 have spurred some firms to build solar plants in the U.S. But, she observes, “they are all small scale, just large enough to meet but not exceed government requirements for domestic production,” and they do not require many employees to operate.—MELODY VOITH
geoengineering methods are eventually used. The statement stresses that a strong commitment to emissions reduction and development of low-carbon technology is independent of whether geoengineering ultimately proves safe and feasible. Yet society’s efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions have been limited and leave open the possibility of large changes to the planet’s climate in the future, the statement says. Therefore, the statement continues, it is important to conduct research on climate intervention methods—including technology to strip carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it or to reflect sunlight into space (C&EN, Nov. 23, 2009, page 28). The gathering was designed to kick off international discussion on geoengineering and set “the stage so people in technology and science are open to this conversation,” says Margaret S. Leinen, the head of the Climate Response Fund, a nonprofit organization focused on climate intervention research. The nonprofit developed the conference in partnership with the Guttman Initiative, a philanthropic group. The Asilomar conference comes after action on geoengineering by other scientific groups. For instance, the Royal Society announced in March that it is working with TWAS, which is the academy of sciences for the developing world, and the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental group, on an initiative to ensure strict governance of geoengineering projects to reflect sunlight back into space, an effort called solar radiation management.—CHERYL HOGUE
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BP Solar has stopped making solar cells at this Frederick, Md., facility.
A strong commitment to emissions reduction and development of low-carbon technology is independent of whether geoengineering ultimately proves safe and feasible.
