Setting or Rising?: Aurora’s solar biz

AURORA | General Electric’s $600-million solar panel manufacturing facility landed on the city’s economic scrap heap last week.

The PrimeStar Solar project, GE explained, simply wasn’t viable in an increasingly competitive solar market. That means the 350 jobs the facility was expected to bring won’t happen, and 50 employees working at an associated research facility will lose their jobs.

The announcement was a blow to the city’s employment overall, but also to Aurora’s burgeoning solar industry, which has seen marked growth in recent years.

Still, experts say that while the solar market is experiencing some growing pains — energy providers are looking to roll back some solar power subsidies, and solar panels remain a pricey addition for most home-

owners — Aurora is still in a good position when it comes to solar energy.

“Overall, we are very, very optimistic about the industry,” said Dick Hinson, executive vice president of the Aurora Economic Development Council. “The potential is tremendous.”

Hinson pointed to two Aurora facilities in particular that he said make the city a desirable destination for future solar projects: the Solar Technology Acceleration Center, commonly known as SolarTAC, and the Ecotech Institute.

SolarTAC is a 74-acre solar energy testing facility on the city’s eastern edge. The research center is comprised of nine companies developing and testing new solar technologies with an eye toward getting more of the nation’s energy from the sun, instead of non-renewable resources.

“Having that here in our backyard makes it very convenient for people who are interested in the solar industry and interested in maximizing use of that knowledge,” Hinson said.

Ecotech is a trade school focused on jobs in the renewable energy sector, including solar power.

When GE announced plans to open the solar panel manufacturing facility in 2011, the company looked poised to join Solar-TAC and Ecotech and make Aurora a hub of solar activity.

But a year after the announcement, the project seemed to be running into trouble. GE officials said in summer 2012 that they were delaying the Aurora project because of steep price declines by their competitors.

GE spokeswoman Lindsay Theile pointed to continued struggles in solar panel pricing as a reason for the project’s collapse and said a year after delaying PrimeStar, GE realized it wasn’t viable.

“Doing it now is really in the best interest of the community and of our customers,” she said.

At the same time GE scrapped the Aurora plant and shut down an associated research facility in Arvada, the company announced that it was selling it’s cadmium telluride solar technology to First Solar and partnering with the Arizona-based company. The move, GE said in a statement, would “accelerate the development of cadmium telluride solar module performance and improve efficiency at manufacturing scale.”

While the industrial giant had scrapped the Aurora project, they weren’t getting out of solar completely, and their technology would continue to be developed.

Dustin Smith, the CEO of SolarTAC, said that’s an important detail that has largely been lost in the ongoing discussion about the demise of GE’s Aurora project.

“For the industry that’s actually a good thing because it means that competition is working and companies are starting to streamline,” he said.

Smith said the research at SolarTAC is focused on the long-term viability of the technology, not so much on the day-to-day developments of the industry.

“Our focus is long-term, where are we going to be in 25 years and what can we do for the industry to help that happen,” he said.

While prices for solar panels remains an issue for manufacturers, a report this week from the United States Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said solar photovoltaic power systems continued to drop in price for consumers last year and through the first half of this year.

The report, released Tuesday, said installed prices for PV systems last year fell by about 30 cents per watt.

“This marks the third year in a row of significant price reductions for PV systems in the U.S.,” Galen Barbose of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division and one of the report’s co-authors said in a statement.

And established local businesses have also jumped into the solar game in recent years, with construction giant Adolfson & Peterson building a solar and thermal facility near East Sixth Avenue and Airport Boulevard and the E-470 toll authority installing solar panels along the toll road. The E-470 panels are expected to save the toll authority $1 million in energy costs over the next 20 years.

Still, when it comes to solar power creating jobs, the industry has grown slowly.

“It’s an industry going through change, trying to find itself, trying to find what technologies really make sense,” Hinson said.

To draw GE to Aurora, AEDC helped negotiate a tax incentive package that would have given the company $9.4 million worth of tax rebates once they opened for business. Since the project won’t happen, the company will never see those rebates.

Hisnon said AEDC won’t hesitate to try to attract more companies in the solar industry to Aurora in light of the GE announcement.

“I think this is a one-of-a-kind issue,” he said.

The industry will find its legs, Hinson said, and eventually there will be cheap and efficient solar panels.

“There has got to be that happy medium where they can find something that the market will really welcome,” he said. “It’s the technology, the technology has to advance.”