Wednesday, March 30, 2016

SunEdison stock plunges amid report of possible bankruptcy filing, SEC probe

SunEdison Inc., a leading solar-power company saddled with nearly $10 billion of long-term debt, is at risk of filing for bankruptcy protection, one of SunEdison’s affiliates said Tuesday.
SunEdison also reportedly is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over whether the company might have overstated to investors how much cash it had on hand in November.
In response to both developments, SunEdison’s already battered stock plunged further to less than $1 a share. The stock fell 69 cents, or 55 percent, to close at 57 cents a share Tuesday. At midday Wednesday, the price per share was 59 cents.
Last July, SunEdison was trading above $31 a share. At that point, SunEdison had a market value of $10 billion; it’s now about $400 million.
Based in Maryland Heights, Mo., SunEdison provides systems using solar power and other renewable energy. The company also has solar research and development facility in Belmont, Calif. It also developed wind farmsin Maine.
The firm has two so-called yieldcos, TerraForm Global Inc. and TerraForm Power Inc., that raise money from public investors to buy power assets from developers and sell power to utilities to generate steady dividends for those investors.
TerraForm Global, in an SEC filing Tuesday, said SunEdison’s “liquidity difficulties” mean that “there is a substantial risk that SunEdison will soon seek bankruptcy protection.”
SunEdison has yet to report its financial condition as of the end of 2015. Earlier this month, the company delayed filing its full-year results because it found “material weaknesses in its internal controls over financial reporting.”
In its most recent quarterly filing, for the three months ended Sept. 30, SunEdison reported that its long-term debt had swelled to $9.8 billion from $5.9 billion nine months earlier.
On a Nov. 10 earnings call with analysts, SunEdison said it had $1.4 billion of cash. But the SEC is looking into whether SunEdison overstated its liquidity, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter.
Those sources said much of that cash already was earmarked for project construction or debt service and thus couldn’t be accessed by SunEdison, the newspaper reported.
The SEC declined comment, and SunEdison said it was not commenting on either the reported SEC probe or the TerraForm Global filing.
Through the first nine months of 2015, SunEdison posted a loss of $919 million on sales of $1.25 billion.

The World’s Largest Green Energy Company Is Facing Bankruptcy

SunEdison, which bills itself as the world’s largest green energy company, may soon file for bankruptcy protection, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as the company faces “liquidity difficulties” despite getting millions in government subsidies.
An SEC filing from TerraForm Global, a unit of SunEdison, claims “due to SunEdison’s liquidity difficulties, there is a substantial risk that SunEdison will soon seek bankruptcy protection.” Both SunEdison and TerraForm are delaying the filing of their annual financial report to the SEC.
News of SunEdison’s impending bankruptcy filing comes after the company’s shares fell 95 percent in the past 12 months, with shares now trading for less than $1 for the first time since the green energy company went public in 1995. SunEdison’s market value fell from $10 billion in July 2015 to around $400 million today.
The news also comes after the SEC announced it was launching an investigation into SunEdison’s disclosures to shareholders regarding the company’s liquidity. SEC enforcement officials “are looking into whether SunEdison overstated its liquidity last fall when it told investors it had more than $1 billion in cash,”according to The Wall Street Journal.
SunEdison builds “advanced solar technology and develops, finances, installs and operates distributed solar power systems,” according to the company’s website. But this solar company has gotten millions from U.S. taxpayers.
The pro-labor union group Good Jobs First reported last year that SunEdison and its subsidiaries got nearly $650 million in subsidies and tax credits from the federal government since 2000. It was the 13th most heavily-subsidized company in America.
This includes nearly $4.6 million in subsidies from the Department of Energy and Department of Treasury. Watchdog.org reported in October 2015 that SunEdison had gotten nearly $4.6 million from the Obama administration, including funding to build semi-conductors. A SunEdison bankruptcy could leave taxpayers on the hook for more than $2 billion.
SunEdison isn’t the only green energy company to fail after getting generous taxpayer support. Abengoa, a Spanish green firm, has been in dire financial straits for months, and recently got a 7-month deadline to right its finances from a Spanish bankruptcy judge.
In total, Abengoa has gotten more than $605 million in taxpayer support, according to Good Jobs First.
The most iconic green energy failures, Solyndra and Abound Solar, cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Solyndra got $535 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration, but declared bankruptcy in 2011. Abound Solar declared bankruptcy in 2012 after drawing down on $70 million of its $400 million loan guarantee from the federal government.
A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation based on internal documents and testimony from sources within Abound Solar found the company was knowingly selling a faulty, underperforming product, and may have mislead lenders at one point in order to keep itself afloat.
The company knew its panels were faulty prior to obtaining taxpayer dollars, according to sources, but kept pushing the product out the door in order to meet Department of Energy goals required for their $400 million loan guarantee.
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Thursday, March 24, 2016

Farmers at Adams meeting get details about proposed wind project

ADAMS — Farmers squeezed between falling milk prices, high land values and rising costs of feed and equipment gathered in the fire hall Wednesday night to hear whether they might hope for a measure of salvation in the form of wind energy lease payments.
William M. Moore, principal of Hudson Energy Development, said a wind project across Henderson, Hounsfield, Adams, Rodman, Ellisburg and Lorraine could become the largest wind-energy facility in the eastern United States if the project can clear regulatory hurdles and the court of public opinion.
He was speaking to the choir, however, as it was clear the more than 20 farmers at the get-to-know-you meeting had pretty much made up their minds that the potential gains from wind-tower leases of up to $12,000 per year per tower would go a long way toward a much rosier financial picture down on the farm.
Mr. Moore laid out a project stretching from, roughly, the Oswego County line in Ellisburg north to very near Route 12F in the town of Hounsfield. That creates a potential footprint that is more than 20 miles north to south and up to 9 miles west to east. The preliminary area map takes towers from very near the Lake Ontario shore to east of Interstate 81. While Mr. Moore didn’t know the area of the project map, he agreed it was “pretty big.”
That would be in keeping with the production goals sketched out by the developer; Mr. Moore said the project, producing 3 to 3.5 megawatts per tower, could have a 400-megawatt faceplate capacity.
The developer said that while wind values in the project area don’t match those at the top of the Tug Hill Plateau, where the Maple Ridge wind facility is located, advances in technology are allowing greater production of electricity from lower wind velocities.
Some of that, he said, comes from improvements in the generators themselves. But much of it comes from much larger blades attached to much higher towers. The result might be towers from 600 to 700 feet tall on future projects, although he did not predict a specific height for the project planned for southern Jefferson County.
There are hurdles beyond the regulatory requirements the project needs to clear. The biggest leap is the state of existing transmission capability. The Independent System Operator has identified the north country, especially in Jefferson County, as an area badly underserved in transmission capacity. The county has three 115 kilovolt lines, including one that comes out of National Grid’s outer Coffeen Street generating station.
But Mr. Moore said that the county’s barely high voltage lines are old, with towers in poor shape, and likely could not handle a 400-megawatt project.
Hudson Energy’s solution, Mr. Moore said, was a plan to help National Grid upgrade the transmission capacity, which would create a path for the project’s electricity and improve the electrical infrastructure in the county at the same time.
“This is not a great place for a wind farm because you don’t have a place to plug it in, if you will,” Mr. Moore said. “But an upgrade to the transmission lines would create a transmission solution.”
While he was unwilling to say just what Hudson Energy’s solution is, he said “You can’t build a small project and spend a lot of money upgrading the transmission system.”
In his 400-megawatt vision, Mr. Moore said towers could be spread a mile or more apart. This would create fewer turbines to pass around to more landowners, dimming the prospects for multiple lease payments for all but the largest property owners.
“An easy way to deal with that would be to create a wind zone, where everyone within the zone would share in income from the towers,” Mr. Moore suggested.
Emphasizing the total economic benefits to the region, Mr. Moore dangled $50 million a year in total project payments to the region, including leases and local tax benefits.
However, he said the project could not work without a 20-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement signed by the county, all the affected towns and all the school districts with the project boundaries.
And he said he did not know what kind of in-lieu-of payments would be arranged, saying that is a critical part of the negotiating process.
Several of the farm owners put a glass-half-full take on PILOT payments, saying that any increase would be better than the straight farmland payments the taxing districts are now receiving.
With county Legislators Patrick Jareo and Jeremiah Maxon sitting in, several speakers criticized the Legislature’s growing opposition to high-value tax abatements for wind farms. Many of the same speakers criticized the Watertown Daily Times — or as one farmer said, “the folks up on Washington Street” — for its treatment of the PILOT issue.
Mr. Moore also, in answer to a question from the floor, said that while the goal of the state’s Article 10 “one-stop permitting” for energy projects is to take permitting decisions to the state level, local opposition to the plan could present challenges.
“It gets sticky unless you have townwide and countywide support,” Mr. Moore said.
Hudson Energy will continue to assess support for the project, although it was pretty clear the group that met Wednesday night was pretty much all on board. Mr. Moore said there would be further community meetings in the future to talk about the proposal.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Sentencings for Dean Skelos and Sheldon Silver Are Now Set for Same Day

The two recent public corruption trials in Manhattan — of Sheldon Silver, the former State Assembly speaker, and Dean G. Skelos, the former State Senate majority leader — were notable, among other reasons, for their timing. At one point, both trials moved ahead almost in sync, in federal courthouses near each other, each drawing crowds of spectators and reporters.
Now both former politicians will be sentenced at precisely the same hour on the same day.
On Monday, Judge Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court issued an order rescheduling Mr. Skelos’s sentencing for 10 a.m. on April 13. Another judge, Valerie E. Caproni, who presided over Mr. Silver’s trial, had already set that time and date for his sentencing. Mr. Silver, a Democrat from Manhattan, was convicted of corruption charges on Nov. 30.
A court filing shows that the new sentencing time for Mr. Skelos, a Republican from Long Island, and his son, Adam, who were convicted on corruption charges in December, came after the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York wrote to Judge Wood, proposing the new date and time after saying they had consulted with the Skeloses’ lawyers.
Was there some strategic reason for the two sentencing hearings to occur at the same moment? A government official said on Monday that the timing was purely coincidental. And a federal court spokesman added: “There is no master calendar. Each judge is responsible for their own scheduling.”


Lawyers in the two cases either could not be reached for comment or declined to comment on Monday. But given the fluidity of court cases and the flurry of legal motions expected to be filed before the sentencing hearings occur, it seems quite likely that one or both of the dates will end up being moved, yet again.
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