Last Monday, it was my privilege to join the CEOs of Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning in Clarksville to announce Hemlock's decision to invest $1.2 billion in a new facility in Tennessee for the manufacture of polycrystalline silicon, a primary component in the construction of solar panels and other electronic devices.
Following the announcement, company officials presented me with a small paperweight for my desk, a Lucite cylinder with shining gray flakes of polysilicon, as it's called, suspended in the center. It's hard to imagine such a simple material could play such an important role in Tennessee's future, but creating polysilicon in such a pure form is an energy intensive process requiring complex and expensive technology and a highly skilled work force. Hemlock's Tennessee facility will initially employ 500 workers, but could easily grow to 800 or 900 within a decade.
In the end, the unit of energy used to create pure polysilicon will result in the manufacture of a solar panel that will produce many times the energy used to create it. It's no wonder that as the price of fossil fuels grow and limits on carbon emissions become more restrictive, companies are turning to renewable energy sources like solar and wind to lower their costs and increase efficiency.
