LAS VEGAS – Hard by the Las Vegas airport, the industrial infrastructure of the solar economy is rising in a former furniture factory. Phalanxes of orange robots swivel and dip as they practice assembling components for solar power plants to be built by Silicon Valley startup Ausra.
It’s North America’s first solar power plant factory and it went online Monday when Ausra CEO Robert Fishman and U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, flipped the switch to start the production line. Ausra’s automated 130,000-square-foot factory is key to the Palo Alto company’s aim of cutting manufacturing costs to make solar energy competitive with fossil fuels.
A large robot picks up 78-square-foot pieces of glass and places them on a conveyor belt so a machine can apply strips of adhesive. Other robots transfer the glass to another line where a dozen bots weld together 53-foot-long steel frames. The completed solar arrays will be trucked to California where Ausra is building a 177-megawatt solar power station for utility PG&E (PCG) on 640 acres of agricultural land in San Luis Obispo County. (To see a video of the robots in action, click here.)
The arrays focus sunlight on water-filled tubes to create steam to drive a turbine. Ausra manufacturing exec David McKay points to where standard-issue boiler pipe will be fed into a machine and treated with a proprietary coating that transforms it into a solar receiver. At peak production the plant will churn out more than 700 megawatts’ worth of equipment year to keep 1,400 solar power plant construction workers employed. “We can produce a lot faster than what we can install,” says McKay.
However, the future of those jobs – and billions in future investments in renewable energy – hangs on whether Congress extends a crucial investment tax credit that the solar industry and utilities are relying on to make large-scale solar power plants competitive with the carbon-spewing variety. The investment tax credit expires at the end of the year and several attempts to pass legislation extending the ITC have failed despite support on both sides of the aisle.
Green Wombat met with the chairman of the Solar Energy Industries Association, Chris O’Brien, last week when he was in San Francisco to get an update on the ITC’s chances. “It’s an election year and it has become part of the political stalemate,” says O’Brien, who heads North America market development and government relations for Swiss-based solar cell equipment maker Oerlikon Solar. “I don’t see an imminent breakthrough.”
The pending demise of the tax credit is “having a significant effect on the development of new business,” according to O’Brien. Solar energy executives, of course, are reluctant to admit that deals are getting dashed, but there’s no doubt the loss of a 30 percent tax credit gives financiers and utilities pause when considering whether to green-light solar power plants that can cost a billion or two to construct.
O’Brien thinks the best-case scenario for the long-term extension of the ITC will come after the presidential election during the lame-duck session of Congress. Otherwise, he says, don’t expect action until around September 2009.
In the meantime, Ausra will keep its robots busy cranking out components for its first California power plant, which is scheduled to start producing green electricity in 2010.
Green Wombat 
This is an excellent program. The current administration and Congress should be chomping at the bit to extend the tax credits. If their serious about promoting alternative energy sources, they’d get moving now!
This is wonderful news that is of course somewhat dampened by our idiotic politicians. I’m sure carbon/ oil lobbyists are calling all their favors in to get this stopped, because they know that once solar energy is in full effect, it will be the beginning of their end.
Our government is so retarded! They should be falling over themselves to extend alternative energy tax credits and funding more programs for alternative energy.
It would not only help to expedite the solution to the current energy/pollution concerns, but would create more job opportunities and pump money into a new industry and give the economy the long term boost it needs, instead of short term economic stimulus packages.
Politicians are not stupid but sometines (actually quite frequently) they are incentivised by special interests (can you say “Big Oil”) to act/vote like fools!
We should be begging Congress to do away with Oil and Coal subsidies more then we worry about renewable ones. If the real market price of Oil and Coal hit the US consumer pocket, it wouldn’t take state and federal, tax payer funded, incentives to convince them to invest in things like solar and wind power.
Big Oil owns the Republican Party. It is led by our two oilmen Bush and Cheney.
Well, it is up to us voters to harass our congress to extend the credit. They are putting our futures in danger by not going full speed ahead to encourage alternatives to oil. We need to let them know that we are sick of inaction!
Think The computer revolution was a boost to the economy. This would offer a whole new industry for this country which would be reccession proof and exportable. We have the technology and ability.We do Not need to miss this opportunity.
THE WAY U. S. A. GOES IT WILL BE ANOTHER SOVIET UNION WHEN THE PEOPLE IN THA NATION THEY HAD NOTHING TO EAT NOW IS COMING THE INCREASE ON THE ELECTRIC BILLS; SOON THE POLITICIANS WILL ASK US TO PAY FOR THE AIR THAT WE BREATH.WHAT WILL BE NEXT?
ANTONIO
Why don’t we just raise the electrical rates to pay for it? Why use tax money with all the overhead required to collect it to fund this? Just raise the electrical rates and let the people using the power pay for it. Or individual areas can mandate their power come from renewable resources. This will raise the selling price of power from renewable resources and provide the competitive market for the power from solar. Not everything has to be done through the federal government – nor should it! The federal government is a horribly inefficient mechanism to do anything.
Well thanks for letting me comment,, this is a good thing if it is done correctly,,, but getting the federal governemnt involved is like having the republican party tell the american peopole that we are going to do a complete overhaul of the tax code,,, yeah remember our friend speaker of the house NEWT GINGRICH,, HAHA LOL the CONTRACT FOR AMERICA,, WHOOPS,,, CONTRACT TO SCREW AMERICA,, YEAH PERFECT,, Now if you want renewable energy then let investors and the people who pay for it pay it through their electric bill we do not need these jack asses in the communist washington,,,,,, governemnt,,, telling you,, that you are free let alone having the tax payer pay for it,, thanks for the time and opportunity,,
People say that it is our “Big Oil” Republican boys in Washington that are against extending the tax credits. In the same breath, they say it is Congress refusing to extend them. Last time I checked, the Congress was Democrat controlled and appears to be doing everything it can to sap power away from those “Big Oil” boys.
Those tax credits SHOULD be extended because we ARE in a national energy crisis and until it is resolved the economy will continue to suffer.
Paying for a project like this through increased utility bills is not an answer either. Millions of families are already struggling to make ends meet and don’t need increased utility bills to add to their burden.
The ONLY viable way to fund a project like this is through tax credits providing incentives to large investors.
We have a very efficient oil based system in our country. This didn’t happen without government assistance and subsidies.
Wind energy has gone from really expensive to under .06 kw are even less!! in simpler words, it is competitive to natural gas and coal today. Solar can be also, but only with economy of scales. Europe already knows this and is implementing these standards.
If we don’t we will be kissing OPEC’s buts until our country dissolves!!
wake up Amercia!!
I am an American living in Spain for 17 years (where wind power constitutes 7% of the country’s energy needs, and solar is well under way) and the most oft asked question is “Do you want to go back to the states?”
My stock answer is, “Not until American society regains its sanity.”
The fact that the ITC will be dropped for developing and implementing alternative energy, in this case solar, is further proof of complete madness.
Thank you, I’ll stay in Europe where more rational people live.
Good luck to you all.
Steve Russell
A yield of 177 megawatts from 640 acres is a conversion efficiency of less than 7%…about 1/3 of current solar cells.