Seal Beach-based solar power systems maker Amonix Inc. has laid off 200 workers at its Nevada manufacturing plant, which has been shut down temporarily, according to the company.
There were no job cuts among the 160 or so workers at the company’s headquarters here, which includes a design and engineering group.
The 214,000-square-foot facility in North Las Vegas makes concentrated photovoltaic solar power panels that are designed in Seal Beach.
“We are retooling the factory so that we can launch the 8700 line [in] the second half of this year,” said Eric Culberson, director of global manufacturing operations, who splits his time between the Vegas facility and the Seal Beach office.
A concentrated photovoltaic system is deemed more efficient than traditional solar technology, using lenses to concentrate sunlight into solar cells. It’s billed as a way to generate electricity while using less water and requiring less space.
Mostly R&D
Amonix had been engaged primarily in research and development for 20 years. It recently began commercializing its products, with a number of venture capitalists backing the company. Last year’s revenue totaled about $80 million.
The cutbacks in Nevada come as Amonix readies its 8700 line, the company’s next generation of products.
“We’re not in high-volume production right now because we finished all our 7700 work,” Culberson said. “So we scaled back to about 100 employees” in Nevada.
Expectations
Amonix expects to get busy again and start rehiring in the summer, once equipment to produce the 8700 line is in place.
“We’ll be in high volume again, basically running operation 24-7,” Culberson said. “Once we go back to the rehiring process, we encourage people who were affected by this to reapply. It’s still four or five months out, but we’ve invested a lot of money in our employees. I’m hoping we get a significant portion of them back.”
The company wrapped up a number of large projects last year with the 7700 generation, shipping 504 systems that can combine to generate 30 megawatts to the world’s largest concentrated photovoltaic power plant in Alamosa, Colo.
“That is enough electricity to power 65,000 homes, a small city,” Culberson said. “One of those modules is … 10-feet wide and 48.5-feet long, about a foot high.”
8700 Series
A module in the 8700 series will generate 72 kilowatts, he said, with the key difference in the lens concentration.
“We’re magnifying the sun at a greater magnitude, changing the lens and the focal depth,” Culberson said. “So the 8700 runs on higher efficiency at a lower cost. More energy is produced in the same square area.”
It can take six to nine months to build one of the modules.
Amonix received $5.9 million of federal stimulus funding specifically for the Nevada factory. The company added about $12 million of its own money for the project.
Amonix is now looking for more capital to buy equipment to produce the 8700 line.
“We’ll add a significant amount of capital investment to get the appropriate equipment,” Culberson said. “They will be our venture capitalists, some of our recent investors, who will invest more into the business.”
Investors
Among the company’s current investors are Los Angeles-based Angeleno Group LLC, Norwalk, Conn.-based MissionPoint Capital Partners, and Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm that placed one of its executives, Jan van Dokkum, as Amonix’s interim chief executive officer following the death of Brian Robertson in a plane crash in December. Robertson led Amonix for the prior two years.
Dokkum is expected to stay at least through the revamping initiative and the launch of the 8700.
“With the new product coming out, we need to make sure we deliver it to the market,” Culberson said. “Jan will be here for that. Jan has experience based on operation issues, and at least at this time for Amonix, we need an operations manager (who) can do financing on deals.”
