Protecting innovative niches in the green economy: investigating the rise and fall of Solyndra, 2005–2011

Abstract

This article examines the establishment and development of a protected 'green' niche around the solar manufacturing industry in the United States in the 2000s. The paper uses the case of Solyndra, an innovative solar manufacturing corporation founded in 2005 and that went bankrupt in 2011, as a window into identifying the key factors that led to the failure of Solyndra. Solyndra was, at the time, the largest recipient of loan funding from the US Department of Energy, making it into the main representative of a key strategic industry identified as a target for federal support as part of US stimulus funding after the 2008 financial crisis. The analysis of the Solyndra failure case presented here highlights the need for strategic transitional niches to be shielded longitudinally by a strategic, entrepreneurial state, and considered in light of transnational exogenous factors. The article also argues for the importance of analysing discursive strategies that perform strategic niches as belonging to specific societal pathways.

Bifacial dye-sensitized solar cells utilizing green-colored NIR sensitive unsymmetrical squaraine dye

“…7,8) This approach was attempted by the Solyndra company utilizing CIGS-based cylindrical solar cells, but the company could not compete on cost and got bankrupt. 9) We have also demonstrated the superiority of the TCO-less cylindrical DSSCs over its flat DSSC device architecture counterparts by measuring the angledependent photovoltaic parameters from 0°to 180°. 10) The recent past has witnessed the emergence of bifacial device architecture for the silicon solar cells aiming towards harnessing enhanced overall PCE in a day.…”

Economic Development Model and Effective Path of Green Industry

“…Glazyrina and Zabelina [4] introduced the results of comparative spatial analysis of various regions of the Russian Federation in the context of the concept of green economy, in which two quantitative factors representing population well-being were used: wage fund and total wage fund and their own per capita regional budget income [4]. Caprotti [5] discussed the establishment and development of protected "green" niche markets around the US solar manufacturing industry in the 2000s [5]. However, their research on environmental pollution is more based on the emission of greenhouse gases, which is rigid and cannot measure the environmental pollution well.…”

‘Candles are not bright enough’

“…It may involve a shopping mall reducing its electricity bills by installing solar panels, or a household motivated by power outages to install solar power as a backup for an unreliable grid supply. The technologies and processes involved in decentralisation are often celebrated as disruptive innovations, notwithstanding prominent failures (Caprotti, 2017;Knuth, 2018). In South Africa, this kind of technological disruption could indeed be cause for celebration: a bottom-up, demand-driven, consumer push for decentralised renewable energy that challenges the monopoly of Eskom, the vertically integrated electricity utility that is heavily invested in coal power and has proved resistant to renewable energy policies and procurement (Baker and Phillips, 2019).…”