Issues at Rocky Mountain Innosphere hinted to Abound Solar's collapse

In the gleaming lobby of the new Rocky Mountain Innosphere building in Fort Collins, a large television tells you in real time how much electricity the solar panels outside are generating.Funded in part by the city of Fort Collins and CSU, the 2-year-old Innosphere is a place for Northern Colorado's best and brightest to collaborate and create, particularly in the fields of biotechnology and alternative energy. The building was designed as a showcase for that work, and the dozens of solar panels above the parking lot help drive the point home.
But while the television in the lobby at 320 E. Vine Drive will tell you how much power the panels are generating today, it won't tell you that the entire installation had to be ripped out and replaced after only a year. Why? Because the China Solar Chargers Wholesalers manufactured only 35 miles away by homegrown Abound Solar stopped working properly.Court records and federal filings show that faulty panels just like those installed at the Innosphere played a significant role in Abound's spectacular and ongoing collapse that's left thousands of creditors and hundreds of employees wondering what happened and American taxpayers out $70 million.
"That was the problem — unrealistic expectations for their product," said Jim Welch of Bella Solar, a leading installer of residential and commercial systems that is based in Louisville, Colo. "It had a lot of risk and it was the wrong technology."Abound spun out of Colorado State University in 2007 after university researchers developed a way to make a new type of solar panel. Instead of using an established technology, the researchers were making what are called thin-film panels, which could have been cheaper to manufacture.
Welch, who has decades of experience in solar panel installations, served as an unpaid consultant during Abound's early years. He said he repeatedly warned Abound executives about the challenges they faced.Other solar panel manufacturers faced the same problems when they got going in the 1980s, Welch said."It took them 20 years and half a billion dollars worth of investment before they came out with China Solar Mp3 player and charger Suppliers product," Welch said. "I said, ‘It's going to be very hard to meet your goals and have a commercially available product in a few years.' "Abound pushed ahead, drawing in about $200 million in private-sector investments. The company abandoned plans to build a massive manufacturing facility in Fort Collins and instead rented a building near Longmont, then pursued an even larger facility in Indiana.In late 2010, around the same time it was making and installing the faulty panels at the Innosphere in Fort Collins, Abound received a federal loan guarantee worth up to $400 million. Within months, however, the company alerted federal overseers that it was having problems making reliable panels.