Accountant me wrote:
Actually, almost every solar company is struggling since their subsidies went down.
Which makes Tesla's share price that much more insane. They acquired Solar City (which was losing something like $6 dollars for every $1 in revenue at the time) to allow their board members to offload their bad investment in Solar City (all but one board member had significant shares in Solar City). And yet when you ask some Tesla investor why their stock is worth so much when they lose so much money on the cars they make, their argument is always that they are diversified and make solar panels (which is another industry where no one seems to be making any money). The roof top tiles they are making are already offered by multiple companies and costs considerably more than large scale solar PV projects.
The only company that I know of that made any money in the solar arena was First Solar [who is an American company that makes a viable product that doesn't require subsidies(although they obviously help)], and even their financials went in the tank when the subsidies dropped in 2016.
To heck with Australia, if you want to see a failed solar project, you need look no further than the Ivanpah solar thermal plant on the California / Nevada border. It has delivered only about 2/3 of it's promised power production in it's first 4 years in existence, has burned to death countless numbers of birds, taken away a large chunk of BLM land (habitat for the endangered desert tortoise) and about 25% of it's power production has come from burning natural gas. It's another in a long line of Obama and Pelosi's pork projects that has failed miserably. Ironically, when it opened it was already technologically obsolete, costing about 2-3 times what a comparable Solar PV facility would cost today and taking up considerably more land. Don't worry it only cost taxpayers $600 million in grants and guarantees on $1.6 billion in loans. Don't completely villainize the industry though, as project like Springbok actually make decent sense (and don't require the subsidies).