First, a big thanks to Ucilia Wang, who filled in for me these past six weeks! She brought analysis on everything from the solar industry to hydrogen fuel cell cars.

And on the day I return, a familiar theme crops up on this Monday morning: another failure in the solar power industry. Bloomberg reports this morning that Siemens is shutting down its solar power unit for good. The unit had wracked up around a billion in losses in the last two years and Siemens is under a lot of pressure to improve its profit margins. It’s leaders have said it’ll do a 12 percent operational profit margin in the next year, and to do that it’ll have to shed poorly performing units.

My only footnote on this news is that I don’t view this as a complete verdict on the failure of the solar industry, but rather the woes of the solar thermal segment of the industry. Siemens paid $418 million to acquire Israel based Solel Solar Systems in 2009. The company makes equipment for utility scale solar thermal power plants. That technology is struggling as the declining cost of solar photovoltaic panels has made solar thermal technology less competitive.

Still, it’s not great that a company of Siemens reach and power is exiting solar completely. On the flip side, this leaves the door open for companies like First Solar to lay claim to key markets, branding itself as the top company for engineering and technology know how in the solar market. I wouldn’t be shocked if a few years down the line we see Siemens get back into solar by acquiring a promising solar PV developer or panel technology innovator. The time to do the acquisition would be now when prices are rock bottom but given the bad tastes in Siemens’ mouth right now, that’s on the range of improbable to impossible.