Trefficient

A great article on WSJ Online today, talks about Toledo, Ohio (where I live) and how it’s utilizing solar technology to reinvent itself. Here are a few excerpts:

Recently, Norm Johnston, a former executive at Toledo glass companies, showed how Solar Fields LLC, a start-up he runs, was leveraging the old glass industry. Walking to the back of a 22,000-square-foot former machine shop in the nearby suburb of Perrysburg, he patted the blue metal casing on a 100-foot-long production line, which his company has designed to coat sheets of glass heated to more than 1,100 degrees with chemicals to make solar cells.

In addition to First Solar, which in 1999 built a factory in Perrysburg that now employs about 600, the University of Toledo is receiving state grants to expand its solar research and incubate thin-film spinoffs. So far, the university has incubated four solar start-ups, including Solar Fields, Xunlight, Innovative Thin Films Ltd. and Advanced Distributed Generation LLC. Toledo’s Regional Growth Partnership, a nonprofit economic development group, is also using state grants to help fund solar and other alternative energy start-ups.

5,000 solar jobs have been created in the last five years in Toledo.

Image from NCCA.

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