Germany's Flabeg GmbH on Friday opened a $30 million plant near Pittsburgh International Airport that makes parabolic mirrors used to harness the sun's energy to generate electricity.
"We believe that concentrated solar power will help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It will be one of the energy providers of the future," said Flabeg CEO Axel Bucholz during an open house at the plant in Findlay. The 228,000-square-foot solar mirror plant is the largest in the world, he said.
Officials of the company's American subsidiary, Flabeg Solar U.S. Corp., said they plan to produce solar mirrors by early next year, and are optimistic the solar power market will heat up in the next few years.
Flabeg expects the plant will reach full production in 2011, depending upon the global demand. The company is anticipating sales of between $120 million and $140 million when it reaches that level, Bucholz said.
Flabeg has about 50 employees at the plant, and anticipates increasing that to about 200 next year as production ramps up. The company projects about 300 jobs when it is running at full capacity, said Torsten Koehler, vice president of operations.
The plant is a highly automated operation that relies on robots to move 70-pound pieces of glass � about 5 1/2-feet long by 5-feet-4 inches high and one-sixth-inch thick � through the production process. Edges of the glass, which is low in iron to allow more light to penetrate, are ground with diamond cutters.
The glass is curved slightly to the desired parabolic shape in ovens heated to 1,075 degrees, and coated with a super-thin layer of reflective silver, topped with a copper protective layer. It is covered with three layers of coatings to protect the reflective surface from weathering. A new mirror is polished and adorned with ceramic plates that hold them to a framework, Flabeg officials said.
When installed in an array, the curved mirrors concentrate and reflect solar rays onto tubes filled with a fluid that is heated and in turn drives turbines connected to a generator. Electricity produced will be fed into the nation's power grid.
The facility is designed to produce 120 parabolic mirrors per hour and 600,000 units annually, said Larry Demich, supervisor of the plant's bending operations.
The parabolic mirrors it produces are destined for solar array parks in the sunny Southwest or in countries like Spain, where the sun shines a lot more often than in Western Pennsylvania. The company is expecting to sell the mirrors to utilities operating in the Southwest, Bucholz said, and is in negotiations with potential customers.
The solar power market has a great potential in the United States, said Mark Mehos, program manager for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which conducts energy research in Golden, Colo.
In the next 20 years, solar energy has the potential to produce 100,000 megawatts of electricity annually for homes and industry, and even increase that capacity by 2050, Mehos said. One megawatt can power about 800 homes.
The market is driven by government energy policy that requires utilities to use solar power to generate a portion of their electricity, as well as pending legislation that could make it more expensive for utilities to generate power at coal-burning plants, Mehos said.
At Flabeg's other plant in Western Pennsylvania, Flabeg Automotive U.S. Corp. in Brackenridge, the company sold most of the property housing that vehicle mirror plant, but is leasing it back from the new the owner, Tomson Scrap Metal. Bucholz declined to reveal the length of the lease.
Flabeg, a leading auto industry mirror producer, is anticipating an improvement in business in 2010, Bucholz said. Flabeg had recalled some of workers previously laid off.
The future of the plant, Bucholz said, will depend on the auto industry.
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