23
COURTESY FIRST SOLAR
“A lot of people
have had
their fingers
burned”Depending on your feelings about Bitcoin, it
may seem appropriate that Nigeria’s love for
the cryptocurrency began with a scam. Mavrodi
Mondial Moneybox (MMM), a 30-year-long global
Ponzi scheme that began in Russia, roped in mil-
lions of Nigerians from late 2015 to the end of
2016 with promises of 30 percent returns in as
little as 30 days. When the government began
to crack down on bank accounts linked to the
scheme, MMM’s operators cut the banks out and
started requiring victims to use Bitcoin. By the
time MMM suspended its payouts, shortly before
Christmas 2016, it had robbed an estimated○ The country’s embrace of the cryptocurrency
yields some old-school fraud protectionsNigerians Battle
Bitcoin Scams
First Solar’s robots
can make a panel in
three and a half hoursTHE BOTTOM LINESome of its jobs are gone for good, but in
the space of a year, materials science has made First Solar an
industry leader again. It still has to keep an eye on China.of Walmart Inc. founder Sam Walton. The Walton
family remains First Solar’s largest shareholder.
First Solar was the leading supplier of solar pan-
els a decade ago, but it struggled to make them
big enough, or quickly enough, to compete once
Chinese companies entered the market in earnest.
The new entrants’ cheap labor and economies of
scale, combined with an 83 percent drop in the
cost of silicon, allowed them to slash prices and
wipe out much of the U.S. industry. (Remember
Solyndra?) First Solar was one of the few survivors,
thanks to federally funded contracts in California.
In the past few years, automation has proven
the key to success, advancing enough to make big-
ger cad-tel panels. “Cad-tel is by far the best semi-
conductor for solar,” says Raffi Garabedian, First
Solar’s chief technology officer. “It’s just 3 microns
thick, and it’s black, so it absorbs all the light.”
CEO Widmar has committed an additional
$1.4 billion over the next two years to expand pro-
duction at two new factories in Vietnam and to
retrofit four others the company runs in Malaysia.
Those factories are exempt from Trump’s tar-
iffs, giving the company a further advantage. Wall
Street has taken note: While solar stocks have typ-
ically remained flat at best over the past year, First
Solar shares have more than doubled.
Beyond the short term, though, First Solar will
be depending on the success of its Asian plants. It
will also have to continue spending to keep pace
with further advances. Researchers worldwide
are working on a new ultracheap semiconductive
material based on perovskites, natural crystals
that are easily replicated in labs. In nature,
these crystals tend to degrade when exposed tosunlight, but if they could be stabilized, panel
makers could leapfrog cad-tel, says Ben Kallo, an
analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. China remains a
threat, says Rhame of Reaves Asset Management:
“We don’t know when their next breakthrough
will come.” —Christopher Martin