If Fisker is able to close on either of these deals, it could move its business to China and gain the funds to start manufacturing its second car the Atlantic, as well as start paying back its loan to the Department of Energy. Fisker has been looking for suitors — partners and acquirers — for months, as it wrapped up a year with an incredible amount of problems.

But $350 million for 85 percent stake is a major discount on the original valuation of Fisker. The company has raised a billion dollars in funding, and at one point back in 2011 had raised money at a reported valuation of $2.2 billion. But in 2012, the company struggled heavily and I had heard that it was looking to raise money last year at a significantly lower valuation. Clearly, when discussions are for majority stake deals for between $200 million and $300 million, there’s been massive discounting.

Fisker isn’t the only energy tech company that’s looking to sell for a discount to Chinese conglomerates. Lithium ion battery maker — which sold batteries for Fisker’s electric car — went bankrupt and its assets are being sold off to Chinese auto tech giant Wanxiang for $256.6 million. A123 Systems held the largest IPO in 2009, raising some $371 million, and went public at $20 per share. A123 also raised more than $350 million from private investors when it was still a startup.

Wanxiang has also invested in struggling electric car company Smith Electric Vehicles. Battery maker Boston Power also turned to Chinese investors to take its electric car battery business to the next level, as did Protean Electric. Electric car company Coda Automotive — which is also struggling — has a joint venture with China battery maker Lishen and a deal with auto maker Great Wall Motors Company.

Chinese companies and the Chinese government are very interested in amassing next-gen technology for electric cars. China is projected to be the largest electric car maker and market in the world, and is already the world’s largest auto market.

It’s not just electric car assets that Chinese companies want. Wanxiang invested $420 million into GreatPoint Energy, a company based in Cambridge, Mass. that converts coal into cleaner-burning natural gas. And Chinese power company Hanergy acquired the assets of Miasole for $30 million (Miasole had raised hundreds of millions of dollars from private investors).

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The solar industry calls this technology “building-integrated photovoltaics” or BIPV. Some of this new capacity will come from thin film solar panels that will be able to be printed right onto building materials, like shingles, steel roof casing, and windows. A lot of companies have been gunning for this market, and many have been held back by the difficult solar production market in 2012. There are at least 53 companies working on this tech, says Pike.

Dow launched its solar shingle product about a year ago in Colorado and began selling them in California and Texas earlier this year. Miasole, which was sold to China’s Hanergy in a firesale, had been working on BIPV, as had Arizona-based Global Solar Energy, which recently started layoffs and curbed manufacturing. Dozens of solar module makers went bankrupt or struggled in 2012, due to an oversupply and rock bottom prices.

But the BIPV market could provide a bright spot, says the Pike report. The value of the BIPV market could quadruple over the next five years from $606 million in 2012 to $2.4 billion in 2017. The market will also be encouraged by a rebound of home sales and construction.

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Hanergy plans to buy MiaSole for a measly $30 million, according to the letter, and also reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. While the Silicon Valley solar company has been mum about how much venture capital it’s raised since its inception in 2001, published reports have put the figure somewhere between $400 million and $500 million by the end of 2011. Earlier this year, the company raised $55 million.

MiaSole was desperate for a white knight to rescue it from oblivion. After years of research and development, the company seemed to have finally nailed its manufacturing process to making solar panels out of copper, indium gallium and selenium (CIGS) that are more efficient than many rivaling CIGS thin film companies. But it was running out of money and needed to expand its production and attract customers. CEO John Carrington joined MiaSole late last year, and he made a public appeal in December for investors and partners who could bring money and sales and marketing expertise.

Hanergy may not be a well-known company in the U.S., but it’s large renewable energy producer in China. We pointed out in this post back in June that Hanergy is a company worth watching not only because of its large hydropower and solar panel production plants in China, but also because of its involvement in installing solar energy equipment. Hanergy won a 3-year deal to install solar panels on Ikea’s stores in China. The company also has built a wind energy generation business within China.

With the purchase of MiaSole, Hanergy is knitting together a global solar thin film empire. Last week, the company completed the purchase of CIGS thin film maker Solibro from Q-Cells in Germany. Hanergy said it would increase Solibro’s production for the European market. With MiaSole’s purchase, Hanergy, of course, will have a CIGS thin film manufacturing base in the U.S.

Solar startups have been picked off one by one cheaply – or filed for bankruptcy – over the past 19 months because the global solar market has been plagued by a glut of solar panels. The fast-falling panel prices – roughly 50 percent in 2011 alone and 30 percent so far this year – have put an enormous pressure on companies to lower their prices. That pressure is particularly difficult to handle for startups, which often have higher manufacturing costs initially when they are scaling up production of their technology. And many of them indeed were trying to raise more money and make that leap to mass production when the financial market crisis hit in late 2008, followed by the oversupply of solar panels starting in 2011.

One of the remaining CIGS thin film companies from Silicon Valley, SoloPower, hopes to reverse the trend. The company inaugurated its first large factory in Portland, Ore., last week and plans to start making use of a $197 million federal loan guarantee to expand production.

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Hanergy is a large renewable energy producer in China and runs 6 GW of hydropower plants and employs 5,000 people worldwide. It also claims to have factories that can produce 2 GW of solar panels per year. It built two factories with 300 MW of capacity each in 2011.

Hanergy made its move into the U.S. market when it set up an office south of San Francisco in 2010.  The company also has built a wind energy generation business within China.

What is intriguing about the privately held Hanergy, aside from its buildup of a massive production capability at a time when the world market is plagued by a glut of solar panels, is its pursuit of thin film solar technology. The company makes amorphous-silicon based thin film panels, a type of technology that fell out of favor in the U.S. and Europe when several venture-backed startups working on it went out of business or still struggle to make it work.

Amorphous-silicon thin film technology promises to deliver low-cost solar panels with an ultra thin layer of cells. But the costs of buying equipment and starting production can be quite high, and reducing those costs during mass production often takes longer than expected (this issue isn’t unique to amorphous-silicon thin films but applies to new solar technologies in general). Amorphous-silicon solar thin films also tend to be less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than technologies that use other semiconductors, such as silicon or copper-indium-gallium-selenide.

Manufacturers can sell lower-efficiency panels as long as they price them lower than the competing but higher-efficient panels. But accomplishing that has proven difficult when, in addition to dealing with high start-up production costs, you have to compete with technologies that are producing cheaper and cheaper solar panels as well.

Amorphous-silicon technology is still alive and may even be doing well in Asia, where there remains a number of manufacturers. DuPont, which has an amorphous silicon thin film factory in China, announced Wednesday that it will sell 22.75 MW of the thin films for two projects in Thailand.

In a write-up dated mid-2010, Hanergy said it was building a factory to make amorphous silicon solar panels (with an added microcrystalline layer) that could covert 9.5 percent of the sunlight that falls on them into electricity. Other thin film technologies had efficiencies a few percentage points higher than that back then, and panels made with much thicker silicon cells had efficiencies mostly in the mid-teens.

Hanergy remains a big believer in thin film technology and last week announced it was going to buy Solibro, a German company that makes solar panels using copper-indium-gallium-selenide cells. Solibro’s owner, Q-Cells, filed for bankruptcy a few months back.

Hanergy doesn’t just want to produce solar panels, it also wants to build solar power projects. That is one of its goals for the U.S. market, and it could benefit from the current trade case against imported Chinese silicon solar cells. However, the project development and construction business is a completely different playground that doesn’t easily accommodate new comers, even those armed with massive factories.

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