Solar Winners: Jinko Solar, ReneSola

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's been a bullish week of trading in solar, as a confluence of news has withstood the tide of negative pricing data points.

Two earnings pre-announcements out of China started the bullish trading -- Daqo New Energy (DQN) on Friday, followed by the LDK Solar (LDK) pre-report on Monday that led to a broad sector rally.

>>Solar Winners: Solar Finally Feeling the Love from Investors

Add to the bullish pre-reports the price of crude oil rising above $91, and even more bullish indications that crude is headed for at least $100, and the general equity market rally, and add to that the steady stream of 2011 solar outlook reports from the Street, and some new money is finally being funneled back into solar.

One can even make the case that SunPower (SPWRA) winning 711 megawatts in solar projects from Southern California Edison is another sign of the coming growth in the U.S. photovoltaic market.

>>SunPower: Best of Times, Worst of Times

On the one hand, the Southern California deal was more or less a catch-up deal for its renewable energy portfolio, after the utility ditched the 800MW Calico project in recent weeks, and ended up selling the project to a solar project development company, K Road Power.

>>Solar PV Eating Solar Thermal's Lunch

Yet in the broader perspective, both the K Road deal to transition the Calico project to photovoltaic power, and the SunPower deal with Southern California Edison -- which also awarded another 120MW to FotoWatio for a total of 831 MW -- show that U.S. utility scale solar growth is trending to the photovoltaic technology and away from solar thermal.

On Tuesday, struggling U.S. solar company Evergreen Solar (ESLR) announced that it was shutting down its U.S. solar plant, in a final capitulation to the domination of low-cost solar manufacturing in Asia, where Evergreen's own wafer-making efforts are centered.

>>Evergreen Solar Shutters U.S. Plant

There were several ways to read the Evergreen plant closure as an indication of conditions in the solar industry. For one, pricing is coming down more quickly than anticipated. Evergreen Solar said in closing the plant that prices for its modules had fallen so fast in December it could no longer manufacture with an economically feasible model. Yet Evergreen was always among the highest-priced vendors in the market, and if anything, the plant closure may not indicate a steep price drop across solar, as much as it indicates the long-anticipated shakeout between top tier solar companies and second tier companies that won't win the cost model race.

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