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Obama tours Solyndra plant in May 2010

Solyndra is for sale.

The Fremont-based solar company, which shut down most of its operations last week and laid off 1,100 workers, announced in a bankruptcy filing Tuesday that it will spend the next four weeks looking for a buyer — possibly one that would make its solar panels overseas.

A buyer would not have to repay the $527 million in loans backed by the federal government that Solyndra owes.

Solyndra received the loan guarantees as part of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package — in large part because the company promised to keep manufacturing jobs on American soil.

But industry officials say that the economic factors that drove Solyndra out of business — namely competition from Chinese manufacturers, which have low labor costs and benefit from large government subsidies — mean that whoever buys Solyndra's technology will almost certainly try to manufacture its panels outside the United States.

It may not be difficult for Solyndra to find interested buyers.

"There are decent prospects that someone will acquire Solyndra's technology and find a way to make it more cheaply, and that may mean that it's produced in a different country," said Dan Reicher, a Stanford University law professor who served on Obama's transition team.

"The likelihood is that the assets in the company will probably be purchased by one of the other energy companies," said George Triantis, who teaches bankruptcy law at Stanford.

Solyndra made a unique, cylindrical solar panel, which works best when installed on a large, white roof. Its tubular shape provides more surface area to generate electricity than that of a traditional flat panel.

Because they sit on white roofs that repel the heat of the sun, Solyndra's panels also have the advantage of lowering cooling costs for businesses, said Ron Hofmann, a senior advisor at the California Institute for Energy and the Environment that operates under the California Energy Commission.

"I don't know if Solyndra is going to survive or not," Hofmann said, "but they had an innovative technology with some significant advantages."

But the panels' production costs were too high to keep the company in business. Though Solyndra's panels are estimated to have been installed on more than 1,000 commercial and industrial roofs in 20 countries, the company lost money on nearly every sale, the bankruptcy filing shows.

In the filing, W.G. Stover, the company's chief financial officer, wrote that Solyndra "was forced to reduce its average selling prices to remain competitive." He said that Solyndra had sales of $142 million in 2010 but lost $329 million.

Even so, some observers believe Solyndra's technology can never be profitable.

The government, said Severin Borenstein, co-director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, simply "bet on a technology that wasn't going to be cost-competitive."

"I don’t think the person who buys Solyndra would be likely to produce a product that’s anything like what they are producing now," Borenstein said.

In its bankruptcy filing, Solyndra said "a core group of 113 employees" is still on staff to “to assist the debtors with their restructuring efforts.” The company asked the bankruptcy judge to allow Solyndra to keep paying these employees.

In the filing, Solyndra also said it intends to continue to honor the 25-year limited warranty on its panels. Under the terms of the warranty, Solyndra promised to give its customers a refund if any Solyndra products perform at less than 80 percent of their labeled power rating.

Nullifying the warranties, Solyndra told the court, "will cause Customers to lose confidence in the Debtors and their products, resulting in significant deterioration in sales, which may drastically impact any reorganization efforts."