Saint-Gobain recently announced that construction work on Saint-Gobain Solar's mirror line for solar thermal power stations has begun. Located near Phoenix in Goodyear, Arizona, the plant will be Saint-Gobain Solar's first manufacturing facility in N America. The facility will supply primarily the domestic market and will eventually produce solar mirrors for thermal power station technologies (concentration towers, linear Fresnel lenses, etc). The new solar mirror line is planned to come on-stream in the last quarter of 2011 and will produce 50 new jobs. The investment reportedly complements the company's current solar mirror production base, which includes a parabolic mirror plant in Portugal and a flat mirror facility in Germany. The site's projected capacity corresponds to an annual thermal power output of 300MW, or the equivalent annual energy requirements for an American town of 150,000 inhabitants. Every year, the green energy produced using this plant's mirrors will reportedly enable savings of up to 321,000 tons of carbon dioxide (which would have been generated by a coal-fired power plant), the equivalent of replanting nearly 62,000 acres of forest. More information is available at: www.staint-gobain.com
