All this week CTV News is taking a look at the solar slump happening in Ontario.

Tuesday night, we introduced you to some people who are waiting to install more panels, but have been idled by a government review on new projects.

It's also hurting those who make the panels. Over the past decade, southwestern Ontario has been a prosperous place for solar manufacturers. But the backlog of applications is a problem for them along with international competition.

And some will not recover.

In 2008 solar company Arise Technologies was a bright spot in a regional economy troubled by so many manufacturing losses.

Promise here at home led to the construction of a plant in Germany, but last fall that plant was shut down. And shortly after Arise was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange.

It can't seem to find enough financing and all signs now point to its days in Waterloo as being numbered.

Officials from Arise didn't respond to our request for an interview, but the man who founded the company did.

"It's a function of being in the right place at the right time. Making the right decisions," Ian MacLellan of MacLellan Management Limited says.

MacLellan is no longer with Arise but remains active in an industry that has changed a lot. On the manufacturing side, he says it's hard to compete with China, where there is a staggering amount of cheap capital to fund projects.

"You add on to that the uncertainty that we've seen in the Ontario market and it puts undue pressure on Ontario-based companies and unfortunately some of them have not survived," MacLellan says.

He still thinks the Ontario plan is a good one, particularly because it forces those who want to install large solar farms to build the panels here.

MacLellan also adds "That's why, for example, Canadian Solar set up in Guelph."

Canadian Solar is one of the world's biggest producers of solar equipment. Its manufacturing sites are based almost exclusively in China. But a year and a half ago, it bought an abandoned plant on Speedvale Road in Guelph.

It hosted a job fair and promised to hire 500 people. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty visited in May saying "We're representing the future, we're doing what needs to be done."

There was little indication that day that the immediate future meant a pink slip just six months later.

Milfred Hammerbacher, president of Canadian Solar states, "We ran into some difficulties with government delays and executing the program and we actually had to lay off a shift."

He says Ontario's backlog of unapproved solar applications has hurt the business, "That then compounded with a little election we had last October just really brought things to a halt."

Despite the uncertainty, they're holding course. "Many, many years ago I coined the 'solar rollercoaster' as an apt description of our industry. Great highs and great lows."

A third local company is on that same ride and wants off. Cambridge-based Ontario Photowatt, a division of ATS, is actively looking for someone to buy its Ontario operations. Another division in France is already in bankruptcy.

Despite the negative news, most remain committed to the industry.