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Ford’s Wixom plant northwest of Detroit has sat idle since 2007, a testament to the drastic changes in the automotive manufacturing business in the United States. But the 4.7 million square-foot factory space where millions of Lincoln Continentals and other cars once rolled off its lines and generations of workers earned a good living now has a legitimate shot at becoming a world-class showcase for renewable energy technologies—offering a chance to reinvent a relic of the Rust Belt and turn it into an iconic symbol of the Greentech Revolution.

With the help of generous tax incentives from the state of Michigan and expected U.S. Federal government loans and credits, Ford’s active role, and the visionary participation of energy-storage innovator Xtreme Power and Clairvoyant Energy (and turnkey partner Oerlikon) on the solar side, the now-dormant assembly line may soon provide thousands of jobs as it reverberates with the sounds of advanced energy-storage, thin-film PV, and possibly other cleantech production lines within a few years.

Oerlikon Solar’s Chris O’Brien and Clairvoyant’s CEO David Hardee spoke with me about some of the solar specifics of the project.

The Wixom site would represent the first installation of Oerlikon’s turnkey micromorph production line in the United States. If all the government assistance comes through as planned and the additional financing is lined up, the first silicon thin-film modules would be produced in 2011, with a ramp to full production in early 2012.

The first line would have a nominal capacity of 90MW, both parties confirmed, with as many as three additional lines added in the future—depending on market conditions and future incentives. (Factory floorspace is not an issue, according to Hardee, since “there’s certainly enough room for four lines.”) Although Oerlikon’s current line capacity is 75MW (up from 60MW), O’Brien said the company expects that rating to rise to 90MW, once the Clairvoyant factory is ready for installation and commissioning of the equipment.

Hardee said his company chose Oerlikon’s micromorph-silicon thin-film PV technology because it wanted to make sure the technology was “state of the art, proven, capable, where you get economies of scale, and in our mind we could see the next generation. We like the Oerlikon people; they understand our culture and what we’re trying to do in Michigan. It’s a world-class company. We’re going to have a much deeper relationship with them, rather than [them] just being a vendor.”

“What Clairvoyant is betting on,” explained O’Brien, “is that by investing in Oerlikon’s micromorph line, they can leapfrog to a more competitive cost position, one that’s more competitive even with the continuing decreases in crystalline module prices.”  

Before any tools come in, the Wixom site will have to be renovated and refurbished for its new tenants’ operations. Hardee said that there will be environmental remediation since it’s a brown-field site, and “Ford will have the building cleaned out and ready to occupy. It’s a fair amount of work but it’s not nearly the kind of work we’d need for a green-field development.

“We’ve got 50MW of power going directly into the factory—the largest single site in the state of Michigan for power,” he continued. There’s interstate highway access nearby and rail lines running directly to the plant.

Hardee broke out his company’s expected portion of the $725 million total price tag announced for the project.  “Clairvoyant’s part will be about $250 million of that, with the rest coming from Xtreme,” he said. “That’s just for phase one. For phases two, three, and four, we estimate another $200 million per line.”

While the government incentives take shape (including the Federal programs, which have initial filing deadlines next week), Hardee explained that “on a parallel track, we’re pursuing private equity sources. We’ve got a number of very interested parties.”

From his perspective, O’Brien has seen “some encouraging signs” on the financing front, with conditions moving from “impossible to difficult.” But he also expects that by “early next year, conditions will be much improved.” As for the outlook for the North American market, the Oerlikon exec said the company’s internal view is that the sector “will grow over the next three years to become the largest market in the world.”

The move by Clairvoyant into manufacturing represents a vertical extension of its business model, which up until now has focused on utility-scale solar project development in the U.S. and Europe. Why the change? Based on the company’s experiences as developers, Hardee said they started to see “holes in the supply chain that we were unable to work around. We started thinking that controlling our manufacturing process and being vertically integrated has a lot of merit to it.”

The company, which is actively continuing its project development efforts, “anticipates the original solar panels manufactured in Michigan being placed in Southern California and Arizona as part of our whole process. We’re negotiating large utility-scale power projects in the Southwest.”

Although Clairvoyant will partner with Oerlikon initially, Hardee explained that “in the longer term, we’re tech agnostic. It may be crystalline, it may be CIGS (a PV food group that he thinks has “a good future—we’re actively exploring it”), it could be next-generation Oerlikon. Who knows where all this technology is going? It’s hard to predict.” 

What isn’t hard to predict is a continuation of the growing trend to build more solar production in the States, to serve what most observers believe will be a booming market. Noting what he calls the “gathering momentum for increasing PV plant construction in the U.S.,” Shyam Mehta presents an optimistic forecast in Greentech Media’s new report on PV manufacturing in the U.S.:  

“U.S. cell and module capacity are estimated to grow at an annualized rate of 50% and 45%, respectively, from 2008 to 2012," the report says. "Thin film will continue to occupy a majority of production share in the U.S., constituting 2.69 GW, or 67%, of cell capacity by 2012. Production share in thin-film technologies will be shared relatively evenly between CdTe (18%), amorphous silicon (24%), and CIGS (22%).

“A standout trend over the next half-decade will be the expected ramp of CIGS capacity and production. U.S. CIGS potential or producible supply will grow from 132 MW in 2009 to 626 MW in 2012, although actual production will depend on market conditions and buyers’ appetite for perceived technology risk. At the same time, the build-out of crystalline silicon PV will also proceed at a strong pace over the next few years: crystalline silicon will still comprise the majority share for any one technology, at 35% of cell and module capacity by 2012.”

With the Wixom project announcement and more pending from the likes of Suntech and SunPower, Mehta will likely have to revise his figures, as the installed capacity of U.S.-based solar production continues its upward trend. This is good news for those who believe that a strong PV manufacturing infrastructure is critical not just for the U.S.’s quest for a renewable-energy future but for the nation’s economic well-being and national security as well.