"The Solyndra IPO won't change the competitive dynamic, just the investor perception," Brown said. However, other analysts see the public debut of Solyndra at a time of financial weakness for Energy Conversion as highlighting the financial hurdles the company needs to overcome. Paul Leming, solar analyst with Soleil/Princeton Tech Research, said Energy Conversion has not been a competitive factor in the marketplace, while Solyndra has been able to bring its total installed system cost to what looks like a very competitive level. "Energy Conversion has not been able to get their costs down to the level at which they hoped to be competitive, and the development of Solyndra is not a positive data point," Leming said. Energy Conversion Devices was hovering around between a 6% to 7% gain in the early afternoon, on trading volume of more than 1 million shares above its daily average. -- Reported by Eric Rosenbaum in New York.