Due to the number of different operations that it was involved in, the bankruptcy and carving up of SunEdison has had a lot of moving parts. And while a bankruptcy court earlier approved the sale of the company’s fluidized bed reactor (FBR) polysilicon operations to GCL-Poly, there have been some roadblocks along the way.
One of these came from SunEdison Semiconductor, which the renewable energy developer spun off two years before it went belly-up. Semi still claimed a stake in the technology, and had objected to the sale of the intellectual property to GCL.
According to bankruptcy court documents SunEdison, its creditors and SunEdison Semiconductor appear to have struck a deal which should allow the $150 million deal to go through, which will give GCL-Poly not only SunEdison’s legacy FBR project in California but its share in the SMP “high-pressure” FBR joint venture in Korea.
Additionally, Semi has settled $40 million in claims against SunEdison, while receiving a $2.7 million settlement. The court will have the opportunity to approve the agreement between the parties on January 24.
And while the deal will consolidate FBR operations in fewer hands, the future of the technology is still murky. To date few companies have successfully produced FBR polysilicon, and there is no indication that the SMP joint venture has solved the technical issues which have delayed full ramping of its facility. Similarly, GCL-Poly’s pre-existing FBR project has never reported definitive successK
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.