General Electric Co. (GE) selected Colorado as the site for a new solar-panel plant that will be the biggest in the country, bringing 355 jobs to the Denver suburb of Aurora.
General Electric Co. (GE) selected
Colorado
as
the site for a new solar-panel plant that will be the biggest in the country,
bringing 355 jobs to the
Denver
suburb of
Aurora
.
The new plant, which was announced in April, will be up and running a year
earlier than projected with the first panels coming off the line next year and
being commercially available in 2013. The plant will make enough photovoltaic
panels annually to generate power for 80,000
U.S.
homes, or about 400 megawatts.
GE plans to invest about $300 million in the facility, bringing its investment
in its solar business to about $600 million.
The world's leading maker of gas turbines, GE has been expanding its
renewable-energy businesses as it seeks new revenue streams in its energy
business. The company became the world's second-biggest maker of wind turbines
in less than a decade of purchasing Enron Corp.'s wind business in 2002. It
seeks to grow its solar business in a similar fashion.
"We want this to be a multibillion segment in GE," Victor Abate, who
leads GE's renewable-energy business, said in an interview. "It's going to
be a build-out cycle over the next several years."
GE received no incentives from the federal government for the project, Abate
said. State incentives were focused on job training and construction amounting
to under $15 million.
GE selected
Colorado
from
10 states that jockeyed to win the business.
New
York
lost out in the final round. GE said it will
create 100 new "high-tech" positions at its research facilities in
upstate
New York
.
SolarWorld AG (SWV.XE) of
Germany
currently operates the largest solar-panel manufacturing plant in the
U.S.
, a
Hillsboro
,
Ore.
,
facility that produces panels capable of generating about 350 megawatts annually.
GE's panels will be based on a different technology.
In 2007, GE purchased a minority stake in solar start-up PrimeStar Solar, which
had thin-film solar panel technology. GE eventually acquired the company in its
entirety. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the U.S. Energy
Department, has given a 12.8% efficiency rating to the thin-film solar panels
produced by PrimeStar, a record for the technology. Some conventional solar
panels are more efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. But GE
contends its technology is less costly, and it said it expects to improve the
performance.
"What we have been doing over the past decade is tracking all the
technologies in solar and assessing which ones can get to the lowest cost of
electricity," Abate said. "The cost of solar needed to come down and
that is what has been happening."
Technology from French power-conversion company Converteam, which GE purchased
earlier this year, will complement GE's solar effort by providing utilities and
other customers with solutions for converting sunlight to grid-ready
electricity.
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