Portland Emerges as a Renewable-Energy Powerhouse
Published Feb 13, 2009
Wind farms are springing up east of Portland.
Portland is a renewable-energy powerhouse.
An influx of companies that make wind and solar power generation technology is strengthening the region’s reputation as a place where the potential of alternative sources of energy is taken seriously.
Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems A/S, a major international player in wind turbines, has its U.S. headquarters in downtown Portland.
Iberdrola Renewables Inc. (formerly PPM Energy Inc.), a huge wind-energy producer, and Sun Edison LLC, which acquired local company Renewable NRG in March 2008, sell wholesale renewable energy back to the grid.
In addition, Portland General Electric for three years running sold more renewable power to residential customers than any other utility in the country, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Nearly 70,000 PGE customers pay an average of $7 a month extra for power from renewable resources. That’s about 8.5 percent of the company’s customers, and the raw number is growing by 10 percent a year, says Joe Barra, PGE’s director of customer energy resources.
The area is well positioned to build on its success. The October 2008 federal financial bailout package extended tax credits for investment in renewable energy, and Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski got a state business energy tax credit enacted in 2007.
Sunny Forecast for Solar
As long as the wind blows and the sun shines, Portland will be well served.
“All over the world, demand for renewable energy is growing dramatically,” says Jan Johnson, spokeswoman for Iberdrola Renewables.
The region’s robust solar industry is buoyed by a talent pool with its roots in the semiconductor boom of the 1990s.
“In order to grow fast, Portland was an ideal location,” says John Sedgwick, co-founder and vice president of Solaicx, which started in San Diego in 2003. “The international semiconductor concerns had set up shop and left and also left a large cadre of highly skilled people.”
With demand for solar products rising, Solaicx expects to double or triple its workforce of 60 people by the end of 2009, Sedgwick says. The company specializes in growing monocrystals that are sliced into silicon wafers and sold to companies that manufacture photovoltaic devices.
SolarWorld Industries America takes a different approach. It starts with pure silicon, grows ingots (or crystals), slices wafers and makes the solar cells.
“The business model was from cradle to grave,” says Anne Schneider, head of public relations for the U.S. operations of Germany’s SolarWorld AG.
In 2007, SolarWorld bought a semiconductor facility that a Japanese company had built in Hillsboro but never used. Production started in October 2008 in what is now North America’s largest solar-cell manufacturing facility. By year-end, about 250 people were working there – a number that Schneider says could grow to 1,000 by 2011.
Meanwhile, PGE is building a $1 billion wind farm just east of the region that will power the equivalent of 100,000 homes. Locally, the utility installed 328,000 square feet of solar panels atop ProLogis distribution warehouses in northeast Portland, the largest such project in the Pacific Northwest.
“There is a strong ethic in Oregon about environmental issues,” says Bill Nicholson, PGE’s vice president of customers and economic development. “Always has been.”
Story by Pamela Coyle
Photo by Todd Bennett
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