Soitec Solar Inc. has finally found a home for its massive San Diego solar-panel factory.
The company said on Dec. 15 that it will purchase a 176,000-square-foot industrial building on nearly 15 acres of a Rancho Bernardo business park, where it has the space it needs to potentially double its production capacity.
“With this location, we felt that we could attract the high-tech workforce we need for our manufacturing,” said Clark Crawford, vice president for Soitec Solar, the San Diego-based unit of the French semiconductor company Soitec SA.
Soitec is buying the building from Sony Electronics Inc., which is based in the same Rancho Bernardo campus. Other neighboring companies include Nokia and Broadcom Corp. “It’s what I call a high-technology neighborhood,” Crawford said.
The company said it expects to spend $150 million — a sum that includes the yet-undisclosed purchase price — to overhaul the building’s interior and outfit it with the equipment needed to make its proprietary “concentric photovoltaic” modules that will produce clean energy for clients such as San Diego Gas & Electric Co.
When it’s running at full capacity, the factory will employ 450 people, mainly computer engineers and technicians who will guide a highly automated manufacturing process, Crawford said.
But the hiring won’t happen right away; Soitec, which has an administrative team of 18 based in a La Jolla office building, will hire a ramp-up manufacturing staff of 45 by April and plans to have a group of 80 by July, Crawford said.
A Team Effort
Soitec has worked closely with San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and the nonprofit trade group CleanTech San Diego to find a suitable factory location within city limits.
“Soitec’s new facility will create hundreds of well-paying jobs and build on San Diego’s growing reputation as one of the world’s leading clean-technology clusters,” Sanders said in a statement.
Sanders and other public officials, including California Gov. Jerry Brown, were scheduled to speak at Soitec’s Dec. 16 factory dedication ceremony at the Rancho Bernardo site.
Construction will begin at the factory in early 2012. Crawford said the site will eventually produce 200 megawatts of energy per year, equivalent to the power consumed by 75,000 homes in SDG&E’s service territory. The first phase, of 100 megawatts, will be operational by the end of next year, he said.
Soitec is giving some of the factory space to its joint-venture partner Reflexite Soitec Optical Technology LLC, a new company that will operate its own 100-person operation making silicone-on-glass lens plates used in Soitec’s solar modules. The glass lens plates are a key component of Soitec’s panels; its competitors use plastic, Soitec Chief Financial Officer Olivier Brice said in a recent earnings call with investors.
Because of the glass lens plates and other elements of the panel design, the company says its systems have a sunlight-to-electricity conversion yield of 26 percent, making it two to three times more efficient than standard photovoltaic systems.
Biggest One Yet
Soitec has six other solar factories around the world, Crawford said, but the Rancho Bernardo factory will be the largest.
That can be attributed to the big contracts that Soitec has won in the last year from both SDG&E, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Sempra Energy, and Tenaska Solar Ventures of Nebraska, which is building solar farms in Imperial County with panels produced by Soitec.
The California Public Utilities Commission approved SDG&E’s 155 megawatt agreement in November and was scheduled to consider Tenaska’s 150 megawatt development on Dec. 15.
The solar projects will help SDG&E comply with the state of California’s mandate for utilities to use renewable energy sources to produce at least 33 percent of their electricity by Dec. 31, 2020.
“We want to help California meet its renewable portfolio standard,” André-Jacques Auberton-Hervé, Soitec’s president, CEO and chairman, said in a statement.