Had to look those up, never looked at the technology, just the fact that it was a failed company due to Chinese competition. Interesting idea...
My townhouse is just a few miles from the Solyndra site. I got to watch it being built, attend a dog-and-pony show and plant tour a month or so before they got raided (and pick the techies brains B-) ), and watch it get shut down, stripped down, and the super-clean "toxic site" bought by Seagate and rebuilt into a new disk drive plant.
The technology was great: a glass tube, with amorphous solar cells fabricated on the outside surface. A bunch of them in series (several per inch), so the current and resistive losses are low. Inside another glass tube with the space between them filled with a non-toxic protective coolant liquid, to displace water and oxygen, avoid hot spots, match the index of refraction so they don't lose light, and to some extent strengthen the tube. Fabrication nearly totally automated - to the point that things were moved from storage to the line, from machine to machine, and from last machine to finished product storage by slow-moving autonomous robots (quietly playing cute tunes like "grandfather's clock", to warn pedestrians, and stopping before bumping into them).
Assemblies were built by plugging a bunch of tubes into sockets on two insulated support/bus bar devices to make something that looked like a ladder, with the space between the tubes about the same width as the tubes themselves. Each "Side rail" had a pigtail with a connector at each end - to string them together in a "ladder" the width of an industrial roof.
The tubes convert light striking them from any direction, so you don't have to track the sun. Just set them up on racks horizontally. Paint the roof under them white: The "ladder steps" are spaced out far enough that up to half the light passes between them, bounces diffusely off the roof, and lights the underside of the tubes, too.
The tubes have very little wind resistance. So instead of a strong, heavy, structure anchoring a giant "sail" of solar panels to the building frame, you just sit the panel racks down on the roof and they stay there.
But the business side was a disaster: The thing was run by the guy who was a contribution "bundler"" for the Obama campaign. They spent money like water, to the tune of half a billion dollars. (How the HELL do you make that back in a competitive industry?) Bought (or leased?) acres of ground in silicon valley (talk about pricey!) and built a giant factory from scratch. Ran the construction 24/7 with giant lights and enormous overtime. Put in fancy landscaping and a LOT of lights. Fancy architecture, too, rather than a simple, rectangular building.
To get people to adopt a new technology, when an existing one does the job, you need a substantial price-performance improvement to overcome the greater perceived risk of failure or hidden cost overruns. Rule of thum is that, to actually displace and obsolete the one that you're displacing, the advantage needs to be about ten-to-one. But with this enormous capital investment to recover Solyndra was pricing their product a bit higher than existing solar panels (even before the price war started). This meant they were doomed to fill warehouses, rather than sell and be deployed, right from the start.
Here in the valley, even before they went belly-up, we figured that the whole operation was a scam. Somebody bought a great (or at least plausible) technology, then used it to siphon money out of the public purse into their own, with no real intention of actually selling the product.
The last round of financing was structured so that the government was on the hook for the bill if (when) they went belly-up, while the investors were paid off. The executives, meanwhile, got to keep the enormous salaries they'd been paid through the whole operation.
Once they'd gone bankrupt, they COULD have been reorganized and might have been quite profitable. The plant was about as automated as it gets, requiring almost no labor. Without the half-billion dollar albatross around their necks the panels might have been able to hit a sweet price point. But the executives absconded with the records and wiped the computers (which people here believe was to hide where the money went). Unfortunately they were thorough. They wiped and/or disconnected and removed the machines that ran the line, too. Without that information the plant was lobotomized. Just so much surplus machinery.
