Solar Power Brightens Up Rust Belt

It may only be a matter of time before America’s Rust Belt sheds its image of faded glory for a new moniker that is about as green as it is snazzy, because a new industry has come to town and hit the ground running. At Solar Power International 2009, officials from Ohio sung praises of the Buckeye State’s potential for solar, despite its smoke-belching past and a history of Sunbelt governors trying to lure Midwestern businesses with tax breaks and a union-free workforce. But with federal incentives and a powerful “Buy American” mentality—as well as a growing national desire for energy efficiency, or so we like to think—to motivate renewable energy companies, at few of them have headed for Detroit and the Northeastern industrial states to set up shop.

[Solar] start-ups, wind turbine companies and electric carmakers from California and the Southwest migrate to the nation’s industrial heartland. They’re looking to tap its manufacturing might and legions of skilled workers, hit hard by the near-collapse of the United States auto industry and eager for work.

California-based car maker Fisker Automotive will be manufacturing its next plug-in electric hybrid car at a non-operational General Motors assembly plant in Delaware, whereas Silicon Valley solar power plant builder Skyline Solar has plans to produce its solar panels’ metal arrays through a subsidiary of automotive giant Magna International, located in Michigan. Stirling Energy Systems has already inked deals with two automotive companies to make components for its giant, mirrored solar dishes, not to mention the $30 to $40 million it has invested in the Detroit area over the past year. And the solar companies aren’t looking to the Manufacturing Belt just to save a few dollars here and there, or simply out of a sense of altruism—the connection to automobile manufacturing is closer than it appears.

The back of the mirror facet is a piece of stamped metal, and if you raise the hood of your car, what you see is a stamped metal frame,” said Ian Simington, chief executive of the solar division of NTR, the Irish company that owns Stirling Energy Systems, based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Nobody stamps metal better than automotive manufacturers. So in a sense the choice to go to high-volume suppliers in the greater Detroit area was an easy one for us.”

And that’s not all—there are some even more fundamental similarities present.

For all of green tech’s futuristic sheen, solar power plants and wind farms are made of much of the same stuff as automobiles: machine-stamped steel, glass and gearboxes.