Saint-Gobain Solar, a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, headquartered company, declared that it has commenced the construction work of its solar mirror line used in solar thermal power stations.
The first ever production facility of Saint-Gobain Solar is situated in Goodyear, Arizona, (near Phoenix) in North America. The new facility that started to meet the requirement of domestic market will ultimately manufacture solar mirrors that are utilized in thermal power generation technologies such as linear Fresnel lenses, concentration towers and others in large quantity.
The new solar mirror production facility is anticipated to become functional and commissioned in the last part of the current year and will generate around 50 new local jobs. The production capability of this plant can be compared to an annual thermal power generation output of 300 MW or the power required for the use of nearly 150,000 households in the USA. The Green renewable energy generated by utilizing the mirrors produced from the facility will annually offset around 320,000 t of carbon dioxide, which otherwise would have been produced by using fossil fuels or coal and can be equated to planting of new forests over an area of 62,000 acres.
This happens to be the only plant of Saint-Gobain in the USA committed to the solar thermal market and this plant complements its other plants such as flat mirror production facility in Germany and parabolic mirror plant in Portugal. The new plant will further strengthen the promise of the company towards the production of solar concentrators and to the renewable energy market of the country.
Source: http://www.saint-gobain-northamerica.com