Tuesday, February 23, 2010

More Bad News for First Solar (FSLR)

UPDATE II: "Options Flash "First Solar Burns Out; Bears Taste Blood" (FSLR)"
UPDATE:
"
First Solar:" Wunderlich Launches With Sell Rating, $90 Target" (FSLR)"
Important note:

A problem with grabbing pictures from Google Images.
The more I look at this picture the more I think that it is the Lieberose solar farm.
Which was built on a former Soviet-era military base.

Which kinda misses the point of the Bloomberg story: Farmland.
I'm leaving it up because
a) it was a screw-up and
b) FSLR panels are used in farmland installations.


Plus it's very blue, which reflects my current mood.
Original post:
The stock is down another four bucks in premarket at $109.09.
Here's a First Solar installation in Germany, can you spot the problem?:


That's former farmland. From Barron's Tech Trader Daily:

Update: German Plan Would Nix Subsidy For Solar On Farm Lands

Solar stocks on Monday got a late-day lift when Bloomberg reported that the latest German proposal on modifying the country’s solar subsidies called for a 15% reduction in ground-based “solar parks,” rather than the 25% cut proposed earlier in the year. But the wire service has revised the original story to point out that the new plan would drop all subsidies for farmland converted to solar system use, effective July 1.

The current proposal also calls for preventing an “explosion” in solar power, and proposes allowing overall solar capacity in the country to grow to 66 GW in 2030, from 9 GW in this year.

Hapoalim Securities analyst Gordon Johnson thinks that the late-day rally is going to reverse on Tuesday as the Street becomes aware of the phase-out of subsidies for ground-based systems built on farmland. Johnson reports that about 50% of Germany’s ground-mounted solar market uses agricultural lands, and asserts that he sees “the government’s proposed termination of the agricultural ground-mounted FiT [feed-in-tariff] as [a] headwind to new projects in this segment.”>>>MORE