Alto Ingredients Inc (ALTO)

[Harry Winston]

That doesn’t answer the question why PEIX should restart the plants if the market isn’t profitable.

There's no such thing as a profitable or an unprofitable market. It's just a place, sometimes purely electronic, where stocks and other things are bought and sold. It has no cost basis, no management team (unless you count the individual exchanges) and thus, the concept of profitability has no meaning.

Even if you wanted to measure the profitability of ethanol-producing corporations, it would be difficult, because large companies like Archer Daniels Midland (A.D.M.) and Valero Energy are ethanol producers, and a privately-owned corporation called POET LLC is now producing more ethanol than A.D.M..

Answers to your other questions have already been provided, as you noted.