Wednesday, November 04, 2009 at 11:42:10 AM - by Danny Vo

On Monday, November 2, Japan-based Sanyo Electric opened its new factory in Salem, Oregon, under the corporate banner of Sanyo Solar of Oregon LLC.

The plant, which cost $80 million, will initially employ 100, with another 100 added by April of 2010. Oregon put up more than half the funding, about $45 million (or $225,000 per job, at 200 employees), and the success of the venture is essential to the state, whose economy has been devastated by the housing meltdown. Oregon once produced about 30 percent of the lumber used in new housing construction – a situation now greatly altered as a result of the spotted owl, unsustainable forestry, and an almost dead stop in new housing starts since the recession began.

According to Sanyo’s VP, Mitsuru Homma, the Oregon facility is also critical to establishing the company’s foothold in the solar market, so both the state and Sanyo have a vested interest in seeing the venture succeed.

The sweetheart deal also included $1.2 million, per year, in property tax exemptions on the 130,000-square-foot factory, as well as about $1 million in infrastructure improvements like roads and lighting, with $180,000 thrown in for waived sewer and water connection fees for good measure.

The secret to Sanyo’s increasing edge in the burgeoning solar industry apparently lies at the entrance to the new facility, where solar cells sandwiched between panes of glass collect solar irradiance from both surfaces, making them more efficient (but also more expensive) than most other solar panels.

According to Robert Zerner, business development executive at Sanyo’s San Jose office, the company is the only one in the world that has the technology, and the new factory – located in Salem’s 80-acre Renewable Energy and Technology Park – will house the first two steps in the solar manufacturing process; growing crystals and slicing them into wafers.

Sanyo's combination of two solar technologies (monocrystalline and thin-film) also makes the panels among the most efficient in the world, according to Zerner, beating out German competitor SolarWorld by about 25 percent.

The panels rely on their ability to capture solar irradiance even when skies are cloudy, or when temperatures are high, to meet this superior efficiency, and the extra cost – about 15 percent – is, Zerner notes, worth the solar insolation capture rate.

These inflated costs are largely the result of panel manufacture and assembly on a global scale, with chips traveling around the world to various Sanyo installations before a completed panel can be built.

This is because Sanyo, with its Japanese culture, fears theft of its technology via an increasingly migratory U.S. workforce.

“In Japan, people are lifetime employees.” Notes Sanyo spokesman Aaron Fowles, who says the U.S. workforce’s employer-switching puts technology at risk, especially when employees move from company to company within a specific marketplace like solar development, design and manufacture.

Sanyo has expressed a desire to reduce production costs, making solar competitive with fossil-fueled utility scale generation (i.e., grid parity), but this is unlikely to happen if assembly requires shipping parts from country to country as transportation costs rise.