Solar Panel Manufacturing Plant - Fort Collins, Colorado

On September 09, 2007 in Solar News

http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20070909/BUSINESS/109090153

Solar Power
By Christopher Ortiz

cortiz@fortcollinsnow.com

“A new solar-panel manufacturing plant in Fort Collins could add as many as 500 new jobs and further cement northern Colorado as a hotbed for alternative energy technology.

Officials at AVA Solar Inc., a start up company, announced last week they were preparing to mass produce low-cost solar panels at a new factory to be built near Prospect Road and Interstate 25. The company will start production by the end of 2008.

Mike Masciola, vice president of the Northern Colorado Economic Development Corporation, said AVA’s announcement continues to put northern Colorado on the map of clean and alternative energy activities.

Vestas Wind Systems, a Denmark company, will solidify that energy presence when it opens a wind blade manufacturing plant in Windsor next year.

Together, the two could become a magnet for like industry to locate to northern Colorado, he said.

“It helps validate a number of things we are trying to market about the area,” Masciola said. “First, the CSU presence and all of their research. At the same time it helps highlight that there are clean energy activities in the region. … It creates a brand of environmentally conscious businesses.”

John Green, a local economist in Greeley and former chair of the economic department at the University of Northern Colorado, said AVA’s announcement was all good news for the economy.

“This will be very positive, it is compatible with the alternative energy cluster in northern Colorado that CSU and NCEDC are trying to start in Colorado,” Green said. “Any activity in alternative energy should be positive to that development.”

The technology behind AVA’s panels was developed and incubated in Colorado State University labs through the past 16 years, led by W. S. Sampath, a mechanical engineering professor at the university. The university, which owns the rights to the technology, licensed it to AVA and will be a minority shareholder in the company.

AVA Solar’s breakthrough is in the way it produces the solar panels.

Companies that produce similar solar panels use crystalline silicon chips, the same used in computers, which are more labor intensive, in short supply and expensive.

AVA on the other hand, under Sampath, developed a continuous, automated manufacturing process of the solar panels using glass coating with a cadmium telluride thin film, which the company claims makes the panels highly effective and cheaper than existing technology. The cost to the consumer could be as low as $2 per watt, about half the cost of current solar panels, according to the company. Additionally officials said, the solar technology does not need to be tied to a grid, making it affordable to install and widely available.

The technology harbored by AVA gives way to cheaper production and material costs, giving the company an opportunity to directly compete with traditional coal and natural-gas-based energy.

Once that is accomplished, Sampath said the market for the panels will become “unlimited.”

“(The industry) is growing at 40 percent. It’s only limited because of availability,” he said. “We truly want to make an alternative energy solution.”

Despite a bid from General Electric to license the technology, the company will call northern Colorado home.

Russ Kanjorski, AVA Solar’s strategic planning director, said it was important to stay in Fort Collins.

“The founders are longtime residents (of Fort Collins) and have a tight relationship with CSU,” he said. “Bringing this technology to northern Colorado has been a hope.”

He said with GE, there were no guarantees that the technology would get to the market.

“We weighed the pros and cons and decided in getting the technology to the market, the best way was to do it ourselves,” Kanjorski said.

Kanjorski said the company is currently working on a pilot production with hopes to start beefing up production through the end of next year. The bulk of the new jobs, as many as 500, will be added in the second half of next year.

The first market for the company is large applications — installing solar panels on large-scale power plants. The second market for the company is retail, working with companies such as Wal-Mart to install the panels on top of their stores. And finally, company officials hope to bring the product directly to consumers.

“We are getting the cost down, which will ultimately mean cheaper alternatives to what is available now,” Kanjorski said.

Sampath and two affiliate faculty members and former students of his, Kurt Barth and Al Enzenrother, formed AVA Solar in January to commercialize the technology. Since then, the company has raised two rounds of funding and was recently awarded a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar America Initiative, according to CSU.

According to the university, by 2010, solar cell manufacturing is expected to be a $25 billion-plus industry.

Kanjorski said in the next six to eight months, the company plans to hire a technical team to help design the new plant. The bulk of the hiring will take place in 12 to 18 months from now.

Kanjorski said the majority of the jobs will be in production and should be “good paying” jobs. There was no salary range as of yet. He said he is unsure of how the hiring process to will go about at this point.

Green said the company should have no problem filling the new job positions.

“From a local perceptive, this is a really exciting opportunity for this whole area to be part of this growing industry,” Kanjorski added. “To keep AVA here should really anchor the industry growth in this area.”"

Not only are they attempting to lower the cost of production, and ultimately the retail cost of solar cells, they are also bringing jobs to the area.

I wonder how the costs compare to This humongous plant that will be built in China?

“NEW YORK, Sept 7 (Reuters) - U.S. engineering and construction company Fluor Corp (FLR.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Friday it won a contract worth more than $1 billion to provide engineering, design and other services for a polysilicon plant for LDK Solar Co Ltd (LDK.N: Quote, Profile, Research).

Fluor said it booked front-end engineering and design work in the third quarter, while the engineering, procurement and construction-management services would be booked in 2008.

The plant will be located in Xinyu City, China, adjacent to LDK Solar’s existing solar wafer manufacturing plant.

LDK, which makes multicrystalline solar wafers used in solar panels, has said it plans to reach polysilicon production capacity of 6,000 metric tons by the end of 2008 and 15,000 tons by the end of 2009.

Tight supplies of polysilicon have crimped expansion in the fast-growing solar market, and many companies have moved to develop their own supplies of the key solar cell component.”

With any luck, more companies will keep jobs stateside, especially when the first article quotes “The Industry” as growing by 40%. I know I sure would like to be able to get a job at a solar cell manufacturing plant, as opposed to a fast food restaurant.

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