Total to Buy Up to 60% of SunPower for $1.38 Billion

Here's a Bloomberg article on Total taking a controlling interest in SunPower. My feeling is that when you mix PV and Big Oil you get Big Oil. Remember the Ovonic NiMH batteries and Big Oil?

Total SA (FP), Europe’s third-biggest oil producer, agreed to buy as much as 60 percent of SunPower Corp. (SPWRA) for $1.38 billion, to profit from the global transition to clean energy

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ENIAC said:

Here's a Bloomberg article on Total taking a controlling interest in SunPower. My feeling is that when you mix PV and Big Oil you get Big Oil. Remember the Ovonic NiMH batteries and Big Oil?

Total SA (FP), Europe’s third-biggest oil producer, agreed to buy as much as 60 percent of SunPower Corp. (SPWRA) for $1.38 billion, to profit from the global transition to clean energy

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

This makes perfect sense, if you ask me:

Sunpower panels are some of the most efficient panels on the market. They are/were making great strides in producing high quality, high wattage panels for the residential consumer market. In short, Sunpower is kicking ass.

Enter big oil. Buy the company. Dilute and $%#@ up the product so much that people start saying "I hear Sunpower units are expensive and unreliable!" It won't be long before people drop the Sunpower name and start saying "I hear solar is expensive and unreliable!"

Game. Set. Match to Big Oil.

:evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:

or...as an oil company you realize that your product has a finite supply and while times are good you should probably diversify to become an energy company, not an oil company. Not a bad way to get in the game. SunPower panels are legit. If only they had something to compete with the thin film panels from First Solar and GE.

Don't Shell panels have a pretty good reputation?

Ray

Total's CEO has a reputation for plain speaking and acknowledging Peak Oil. I'm not surprised they are buying PV companies. Afterall IBM just didn't stick with punched cards.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1954176_1954175_1954172,00.html

All that time on the road has convinced him of this: oil supplies will soon run seriously short, and until we come up with something better we need to make sure we suck every last drop from every last nook and cranny on the planet.

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Jimmydreams said:

ENIAC said:

Here's a Bloomberg article on Total taking a controlling interest in SunPower. My feeling is that when you mix PV and Big Oil you get Big Oil. Remember the Ovonic NiMH batteries and Big Oil?

Total SA (FP), Europe’s third-biggest oil producer, agreed to buy as much as 60 percent of SunPower Corp. (SPWRA) for $1.38 billion, to profit from the global transition to clean energy

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Enter big oil. Buy the company. Dilute and $%#@ up the product so much that people start saying "I hear Sunpower units are expensive and unreliable!" It won't be long before people drop the Sunpower name and start saying "I hear solar is expensive and unreliable!"

Click to expand...

+1 I hope this backfires on Total. Wouldn't it be great if this triggers a bunch of VC money to flow into PV and alternate fuel start ups!

Any investor/consumer can see the conflict of interest created by this buy-up. If Microsoft could buy 60% of Apple, what do you think would happen to Apple? Exactly! And Apple folks would be herded back into the Microsoft holding pen.

evnow said:

Total's CEO has a reputation for plain speaking and acknowledging Peak Oil. I'm not surprised they are buying PV companies. Afterall IBM just didn't stick with punched cards.

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True, however IBM also never tried to buy Cisco to stifle TCP/IP and the Internet to keep SNA the dominate networking scheme either. That's the rub.

It is good that the oil companies are seeing the future, and wont let us freeze in the dark when oil runs out.. are they investing in nuclear or coal?

I can understand why people are sceptical - but all oil companies will diversify. That is inevitable given that the reserves and production will keep going down.

Another facet that perhaps has occurred in Big Oil's crystal ball is the advancements being made in Li-ion battery technology. I just finished reading an article in Car and Driver's May 2011 edition. It said.

"A123 is aimed at optimizing the battery's power, energy, and life through the use of nanostructured materials that provide a high surface-area-to-volume ratio. Experimental solid-state (also known as thin-film) cells increase the surface area even more. The potential energy density of these micron-thin ribbons is four-to-five times that of today's Li-ion batteries. As with integrated-circuit manufacturing, the cell materials are deposited one thin layer at a time in a vacuum. The result is an incredibly light, dense cell."

The end result is that you could well see, as someone already has said, they are starting to see themselves in the energy business, not just the oil business. Photovoltaic recharging stations would make sense. However, when we get to 300 to 400 mile/charge batteries I would suggest that some large motel chains start thinking of getting on board with overnight charging stations for their customers with some amount added to your bill for the amount of kWh you consumed overnight. The wait-and-see of that is to follow some of the developments in fast charging batteries without degrading them excessively.

It is a head scratcher. "Oil" is one of the most universally hated words for people in the market for a PV system. The DBD folks that love "Oil" are the last people in the market for a PV system. So, it is safe to say that this Total buy-up is targeting the pro-PV market and an effort to ensure that PV is controlled by Oil until they are done burning every last drop into the atmosphere. The incentive of corporations to buy-up competitors is common knowledge and is done to shelve/destroy the bought company. The unique issue here is that an old wealthy company is "crossing over" to destroy an entirely different new technology. Since PV is a replacement for oil it can't be argued that this is being done for a symbiotic relationship. How does this get by Anti-Trust laws???