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Protecting Innovative Niches in the Green Economy: Investigating the Rise and Fall of Solyndra, 2005–2011

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Protecting Innovative Niches in the Green Economy: Investigating the Rise and Fall of Solyndra, 2005–2011 GeoJournal DOI 10.1007/s10708-016-9722-2 Protecting innovative niches in the green economy: investigating the rise and fall of Solyndra, 2005–2011 Federico Caprotti Ó The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract This article examines the establishment Introduction: the ‘Solar Renaissance’ and development of a protected ‘green’ niche around the solar manufacturing industry in the United States The article focuses on the rise and fall of Solyndra, a in the 2000s. The paper uses the case of Solyndra, an corporation that aimed to take its place in the innovative solar manufacturing corporation founded ‘renaissance’ of the US solar industry from 2005 to in 2005 and that went bankrupt in 2011, as a window 2011. The firm aimed to manufacture and sell into identifying the key factors that led to the failure of innovative thin-film photovoltaic (PV) panels by Solyndra. Solyndra was, at the time, the largest utilizing new materials not dependent on the then recipient of loan funding from the US Department of high prices of polysilicon. In 2009 Solyndra received a Energy, making it into the main representative of a key US$ 535 million loan from the US Department of strategic industry identified as a target for federal Energy’s (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program (LGP). support as part of US stimulus funding after the 2008 This was the largest LGP loan awarded to a renewable financial crisis. The analysis of the Solyndra failure energy corporation. It was heralded as a step towards case presented here highlights the need for strategic bolstering the US’s solar manufacturing capacity, transitional niches to be shielded longitudinally by a while also creating jobs in the new ‘green economy’ strategic, entrepreneurial state, and considered in light and lowering the use of carbon-intensive fuels and of transnational exogenous factors. The article also technologies. Using the theoretical perspectives found argues for the importance of analysing discursive within studies of socio-technical transitions, this strategies that perform strategic niches as belonging to article conceptualises the LGP’s support of Solyndra specific societal pathways. as a specific example of state-led support of a niche that promised innovative potential. Keywords Solar power Á Niche Á Multi-level While Solyndra was identified as a potential niche perspective Á Green economy Á Transition Á success story, by late 2011 the firm had declared Sustainability Á Economic geography bankruptcy and its new manufacturing facilities stood empty. This occurred largely due to several exogenous factors, outlined below, that affected the protected niche within which Solyndra was meant to develop. The case of Solyndra raises important questions concerning how niches are conceptualised and sup- F. Caprotti (&) King’s College London, London, UK ported in the remit of state-sponsored sustainability e-mail: [email protected] transition strategies (Caprotti 2010). Specifically, the 123 GeoJournal article raises the twin issues of: a.) the necessity of Specifically, theories of transition attempt to under- partially isolating niches from the vagaries of market stand the way(s) in which innovative technologies, pricing (and their political-economic uses, as seen in practices and ‘ways of doing’ emerge and are widely the recent example of the effect of falling oil prices on adopted, or fail. To do so, a conceptual perspective the US fracking industry), and b.) the need to envision known as the multi-level perspective (MLP) is widely the protection of innovative niches as a longitudinal used. Briefly, studies of transition informed by the strategy which requires sustained and consistent MLP focus on the ways in which innovation is temporal commitment.1 articulated across three separate but porous levels, i.e., The paper examines the rise and fall of Solyndra, the ‘niche’, the broader ‘regime’, and the ‘landscape’. and the ways in which the firm was discursively Niches are the level at which innovations can grow and constructed and performed during its brief lifespan. are developed. They are characterised by levels of This analysis is based on examination of documentary innovative potential ranging from the highly radical to sources relating to the firm’s development and even- the simply innovative (Smith 2007). At the next level, tual bankruptcy. A comprehensive study was made of socio-technical regimes are broad, dominant sets of reports and documents from the following sources: the rules, agendas, guiding principles, government regu- US Congress, the US Bankruptcy Court, the Depart- lations, and groups of actors (Geels Rip and Kemp ment of Energy (DOE), and the Department of the 1998). Although regimes tend towards stability, niche Treasury (DOT). Additionally, data from national innovations have the potential to interact with, and non-profit organizations, such as the National Renew- potentially change, the regime. After the regime, the able Energy Association (NREL), was used. Corporate socio-technical landscape constitutes the macro-level, reports were also analysed, as were market reports exogenous environment that specific actors cannot from associations and industry bodies such as the modify, but which can be gradually changed through Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). regime modifications (Geels 2005). Scholars of transition have recently focused on the renewable energy sector, including the solar energy Theoretical context: green niches industry, as examples of the emergence of regime- changing innovations within niches. Smith and Raven Solyndra is an example of a single firm that was to (2012), for example, described the development of the become a protected niche around solar manufacturing. photovoltaic industry since the 1960s as a result of a As the discussion below shows, while niches are succession of niche developments: generally conceived as protected envelopes (Geels ‘One can think, for example, of the development 2012), protection of the niche around Solyndra was not of solar photovoltaic cells initially within a sufficiently developed. Solyndra is an important case ‘protective space’ constituted by satellite pro- for analysis because while it rose quickly and was grammes in the 1960s, public research pro- constructed and performed as the central actor within grammes in materials science, and policies for the ‘green’ niche around renewable energy in the US developing renewable energy since the 1970s. in the late 2000s, its failure was also the subject of The protective space was widened further discursive contestation around the meaning of its through international aid programmes for PV bankruptcy for state support of innovative power systems in remote, off-grid development technologies. projects. Since the 1990s, sustainable energy The notion of niche utilised here derives from the policy in some wealthier countries has opened a large body of literature on socio-technical transitions. market-niche for integrating or retrofitting solar power systems into buildings…’ (Smith and 1 In analysing the Solyndra case in light of these issues, it is key Raven 2012: 1025). to acknowledge and remain sensitive to the fact that multiple factors (such as those related to management and decision- A number of studies focusing on a range of making and adverse market conditions) contribute to bank- industries and innovative developments, from animal ruptcy, and that the paper’s focus is on bankruptcy as a means with which to interrogate the protection and management of husbandry (Elzen et al. 2011) to institutional niches in niches. the carbon economy (Foxon 2011) have highlighted 123 GeoJournal the need for not only understanding niches in the constituted a large part of the US solar energy niche. process of transition, but also managing them Nonetheless, in analysing the Solyndra ‘story’, it is (Hoogma et al. 2002; Kemp et al. 1998) as a way of also key to highlight three additional dimensions facilitating and directing transitions (Markard et al. which impacted on the niche around Solyndra, 2012). This results from the understanding that namely: although sustainability transitions are path-dependent, (a) The transnational spatial scale. pathways encompass broad avenues of possible tran- sition gradients within specific boundaries (a ‘transi- There have been recent calls to spatialise studies of tion envelope’) (Bailey and Wilson 2009). In turn, this transition and, more specifically, to apply a level of envelope is determined by a range of factors, including spatial and scalar awareness to analyses of niche the discursive context around what is deemed soci- development (Sengers and Raven 2015; Spa¨th and etally possible, or acceptable. Building on this, it is Rohracher 2012). The article contributes to this therefore crucial to understand the ways in which awareness by considering transnational factors niches are protected. Smith and Raven (2012) argue transnational factors: the paper draws on recent work that this occurs through three main mechanisms: on solar energy niches which highlight the necessarily shielding, nurturing and empowerment. Shielding transnational character of niche development (Wiec- involves protecting a niche from external pressures; zorek et al. 2015). As Gress (2015: 114) has noted with nurturing practices, such as the construction of regard to the Chinese solar industry, the nature of the networks of relevant actors, are focused on helping solar market is such that Chinese solar corporations niches to develop; and empowerment
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