Old Manufacturing Methods Become Green Methods

As the clean energy manufacturing base in this country grows, it often builds upon the facilities and expertise of struggling traditional industries.

The old steel town of Pueblo, Colo., is adapting to the times with a new wind turbine plant. Similarly, in the town of San Angelo, Texas, a steel company took a 50 percent joint venture stake in a wind tower plant in June.

There are many more examples of the co-mingling of old and new industries. A few mills, suffering amid the pulp and paper industry’s retreat, are reorienting to process biofuels. These include a once-shuttered Maine pulp mill being refitted to make biobutanol, as well as two Wisconsin mills that will produce biodiesel from wood waste.

New is also building upon old in the solar industry.

SolarWorld, a German company, opened a manufacturing plant in Oregon last year that makes use of an abandoned semiconductor factory (and recruits many workers from the semiconductor industry). And Stirling Energy Systems, which makes solar electric machines called SunCatchers that will eventually be deployed in California, plans to use automotive suppliers in the United States to make several components (though Stirling will not yet specify its automotive partners).
“SunCatchers use steel, glass and engines,” a company representative said in an e-mail message, “so the natural supply chain is automotive.”