Big desert solar farm means big factory in San Diego

By Onell R. Soto
Originally published March 10, 2011 at 6 a.m., updated March 10, 2011 at 10:36 a.m.

Collaboration landed San Diego new factory
San Diego competed against Nevada and Arizona for the new solar panel factory.

The pitch included business and political leaders working together, said Jim Waring, chairman of CleanTECH San Diego.

"We got to this place because of collaboration, the classic San Diego collaboration story," he said.

The target was Concentrix, a company that was created out of Germany's vaunted Frauhofer Institute, a powerhouse research institution.

In 2009, Concentrix installed one of its pole-mounted solar panels to follow the sun on the University of California San Diego in La Jolla.

The goal wasn't so much to make power, because La Jolla's frequent morning low clouds and fog block the bright sunlight the machine needs, but to get interest in the technology, said Clark Crawford, who heads Concentrix's local operations.

At the time, Concentrix knew that its technology is suited for utility-scale solar farms in places with very bright sunlight. That means its target customers will be in the desert Southwest.

And the weight of the panels means that building a factory near customers makes economic sense because transportation costs would eat up savings from low-cost labor in Asia.

The San Diego group working to land the factory included SDG&E, which has to buy solar power to meet state mandates, plus the Economic Development Corporation, UCSD and the mayor's office.

"They were greeted by a diverse and high-powered group here," Waring said.

The city suggested the company build the factory in an enterprise zone, which will mean it will get tax breaks in exchange for employing local workers, Mayor Jerry Sanders said.

SDG&E suggested Concentrix's technology to Tenaska, the company looking to sell power from a solar farm it's developing in Imperial County.

"They were interested in there being a project that would order panels and support a factory and jobs in San Diego," said Bart Ford, who oversees new power projects for Tenaska.

He took a look at Concentrix and liked what he saw.

"We like the people," he said. "We like the technology."
When negotiating with the developer of a big Imperial Valley solar farm, San Diego Gas & Electric didn't just want green power. It also asked for local jobs.

Specifically, it said the cutting-edge solar panels to be used in the project should be made in San Diego.

So today, the company is announcing a solar farm it has just signed a contract with will be the first customer for the biggest solar panel factory to be built in San Diego.

The factory will employ 450 people once built. The solar farm will take 250 workers to build.

"It's quite exciting," said San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, who was part of the effort to entice solar factory to come to town.

Concentrix Solar, the company building the factory, hasn't decided exactly where it will go, but said it chose San Diego in part because of SDG&E's efforts, and also to become part of a growing cluster of companies working to get energy from the sun and the wind.

"There's this incredible renewable energy ecosystem that's building in San Diego," said Clark Crawford, who heads the company's local operations.

The company, based in Germany, is a subsidiary of Soitec, a French company.

The other two solar panel factories in town are owned by Kyocera, of Japan, and Siliken, from Spain.

The Concentrix panels it will build are nothing like those you see on rooftops around town.

They sit on steel poles and turn to follow the sun across the sky. And they use lenses to focus the sun's rays on highly efficient photovoltaic chips like those used on spacecraft.

That means that shortly after the sun rises, they begin producing almost at full power. Production continues steadily through the day, into the late afternoon.

That's important to people like SDG&E's Jim Avery, who is responsible for making sure the region has all the electricity it needs.

The 150-megawatt Imperial Valley farm will produce full power late in the afternoon in the late summer, when SDG&E needs it the most, he said.

"That's a major benefit to us," he said.

In a traditional photovoltaic solar farm, the panels don't track the sun. In the late afternoon, he said, such a facility is producing less than half the electricity it does when the sun highest in the sky.

At 150 megawatts, the solar farm is about a quarter the size of a typical new gas-fired power plant. Unlike such a power plant, the solar facility can't make power at night, or when it's cloudy.

It's being developed by Tenaska on 1,057 acres of fallow farmland flanking Interstate 8.
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Impact from new solar factory

450 — people who will work there

1,069 — people whose jobs will be indirectly supported by the factory

$22 million — factory’s expected annual payroll

$23 million — factory’s sales tax revenue

Source: San Diego Workforce Partnership


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