Merrimack Company That Supplies Solar Panel Manufacturers is Growing

By David Darman on Tuesday, July 3, 2007.

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Think of solar power in America, and New Hampshire may not the first place that comes to mind.

But this state is home to a fast growing company in the industry, GT Solar in Merrimack.

The company is growing so quickly it is looking to hire about 90 new employees, including some with high tech experience.

Despite its name, GTSolar does not make the solar panels you could put on your roof.

Instead, it designs and assembles equipment needed to make solar cells.

President Thomas Zarella is good at elaborating on what goes on in the companyâ€™s 60,000 square foot factory.

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On a tour, he points out the big metal furnaces that the company ships to solar cell manufacturers.

They look like heavy, wide water tanks, but they are really the vessels that produce the building blocks of solar panels.

Zarella describes this vital first step in making the cells.

Essentially what weâ€™re doing in the furnace is we are melting silicon and making it liquid inside a contained vessel. And through a very specific cooling program, we literally grow a crystal from the bottom of the melt up, so when its completely cooled we have a big, tall crystal, crystalline silicon blockâ€¦.

Once that block cools down, it can be cut and sliced into the wafers that make up solar panels.

But Zarella says how the crystal grows is the most critical part of the process.

Itâ€™ll determine the cost all the way through the rest of the value chain. So weâ€™re in the most critical piece of the value chain for solar products. Our technology is quite enabling and advancing of the technology.

In 2003, the companyâ€™s (GTSolarâ€™s) sales were around ten million dollars,

But by 2006, sales had jumped tenfold, hitting the 100 million dollar mark.

Company officials say most of those sales have been made overseas, particularly to East Asia, China, Japan and Taiwan.

The sales growth has in turn driven the companyâ€™s need to hire new employees.

The workforce has grown from 35 to 140 in just 3 years.

Now GT Global is looking to hire again, and add on another 90 employees.

Wayne Pearson has been working for high tech companies in New England for about 20 years.

But last year,Pearson says he took a job at GT Global because he says the dynamics are very different from what heâ€™s found at his former employers.

â€¦Instead of working for a semiconductor or some other industries that Iâ€™ve worked for where everything is ramping down, ramping down, and a lot of work is going overseas. Here weâ€™re building everything which, most, a majority of the parts do go overseas, but nice to have the work here in the states.

GT Global is one of several companies worldwide supplying equipment to solar panel manufacturers.

Their competitors include Applied Materials in Germany, Spire Corporation in Massachusetts and EPV Solar in New Jersey.

Each of these companies has seen demand for their products grow by about 30 percent a year for the past few years.

Brad Collins of the American Solar Energy Society in Colorado says a combination of factors is driving the growth.

He says for one thing, many people want to get cleaner sources of power.

Collins says government mandates around the world are also helping drive demand.

China for instance has a 15 percent renewable portfolio standard in place by 2015. So you have a driver in place thatâ€™s saying and theyâ€™re growing so rapidly thatâ€™s saying we need to have as much of these materials as possible installed in our buildings in order to meet our goals.

New Hampshire recently passed a renewable portfolio standard that mandates utilities provide a small amount of solar electricity by 2025.

It is now one of more than twenty states that have such a requirement.

As more and more states require a solar component, companies like GT Solar stand to prosper.

Their overseas clients may also do well, as they sell their finished solar panels back into the U.S.