Panda Energy International

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Panda Ethanol, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	1982
Headquarters	Dallas, Texas, USA
Key people	Robert W. Carter, Founder, Chairman and CEO Todd W. Carter, President Janice Carter, EVP, Secretary, and Treasurer
Industry	Gas Utilities, Major Integrated Oil and Gas, Oil and Gas Drilling and Exploration , Oil and Gas Equipment and Services, Oil and Gas Pipelines, Oil and Gas Refining and Marketing
Products	Power plants, Pipelines, Clean fuels, Finance
Revenue	$219 million USD (2005)
Employees	150 (2005)
Website	www.pandaenergy.com

Panda Ethanol, Inc. is an American privately-held company that constructs, maintains and operates environmentally friendly power plants, with the name of the company a reference to the endangered Giant Panda. The company is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with 150 employees and an annual revenue of $219 million USD. It is a division of The Panda Group.

1 History
2 Activities
- 2.1 Total Nonstop Action Wrestling
3 References
4 External link

[edit] History

Panda Energy was founded by current chairman Robert W. Carter in 1982. The creation of the company was a direct result of the passage of the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, which introduced favorable surplus disposal measures for small-scale commercial energy producers. The Carter family have owned a controlling stake in the company ever since, making Panda Energy a family business.

After Panda Energy was awarded a RFP to construct a power plant in North Carolina, it expanded throughout the 1980s, taking advantage of energy market deregulation.

Panda Energy has announced an intent to capitalise on the predicted energy crisis arising from a slump in oil production by offering environmentally friendly alternatives. Following the passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which increased the mandatory quantity of ethanol used in blended gasoline, Panda Energy announced on August 25, 2005, that it would be constructing a $120 million USD ethanol plant in Yuma, Colorado that would process 100 million gallons of ethanol per year. This followed the announcement of a similar plant in Hereford, Texas in May 2005 and preceded the announcement on September 20, 2005, of a third plant, to be constructed in Haskell County, Kansas. In addition to producing ethanol the three plants will also remove millions of pounds of manure from the waste stream, as the manure will be used to fuel the plants.

On November 7, 2006, Panda Energy announced that it had completed its merger with Cirracor, Inc., and that the resultant company would be known as Panda Ethanol, Inc.

[edit] Activities

Through a combination of financing, construction and operational activities, Panda Energy is involved in the creative developing, structuring, and financing of complex, capital-intensive energy projects that represent more than 9,000 megawatts of clean gas technology with a total cost of more than $5 billion in financing.

Panda Energy designs, builds and in some cases administers power plants, with a focus on renewable energy sources such as agricultural products, ethanol, clean coal, biofuel and hydropower.

Panda Energy finances the construction of power plants. A majority of the $98 million USD cost of the Bhote Koshi power plant in Nepal was supplied by Panda Energy, making the company the largest American investor in Nepal between 1997 and 2000. Panda Energy was also the first American company to construct a power plant in the People's Republic of China; this was addressed in the United States Senate on October 5, 2000.

[edit] Total Nonstop Action Wrestling

A stated focus area of Panda Energy is the acquisition of "companies with high growth potential [that may lie] outside of our core areas." In October 2002, Panda Energy purchased a controlling interest (72%) of the Nashville, Tennessee-based professional wrestling promotion Total Nonstop Action Wrestling from founder and CEO Jerry Jarrett. The seemingly unlikely acquisition came about after Dixie Carter, the daughter of Robert W. Carter and a TNA publicist, contacted her father and persuaded him to purchase the company (which was facing bankruptcy after a major financial backer withdrew their support).

On October 31, 2002, Panda Energy created the limited liability company TNA Entertainment in order to administer TNA. While Jeff Jarrett, the former President of TNA, was appointed Vice President, the majority of other management positions were filled by former Panda executives. Chris Sobol, the Panda Manager of Business Development, was appointed Vice President of Operations, and Frank Dickerson (and later Kevin Day) was appointed chief executive officer, while Dixie Carter was made President.

TNA lost money between 2002 and 2005, in some cases up to $1 million USD per month. However, as a result of decreased costs and increased merchandising and advertising revenue, Robert Carter announced in September 2005 that he expected TNA to break even in October 2005 and become profitable by 2006.^{[citation needed]}

In May 2005, Panda Energy rejected a $10 million USD bid by the Nelson Corporation to purchase TNA.^{[citation needed]}

The acquisition of TNA by Panda Energy in 2002 initially provoked (mostly facetious) theorising among the Internet wrestling community that Panda Energy was an extension of World Wrestling Entertainment. The somewhat spurious basis for this claim was that World Wrestling Entertainment had been forced to rename after the World Wildlife Fund (a conservation organization with the initials "WWF" that uses the Giant Panda as its mascot) successfully forced the company to stop trading as the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). It was postulated that WWE Chairman Vince McMahon might have ironically chosen the name Panda Energy in order to mask his acquisition of TNA, thereby preserving the virtual monopoly WWE possessed in the wrestling industry between the bankruptcy of Extreme Championship Wrestling in April 2001 and the formation of TNA in May 2002. These theories were dismissed shortly thereafter when more information on Panda Energy became available.