Jul. 16--DEVENS -- With a gleaming plant, a booming global market and a new $1.2 billion contract with a German distributor, Evergreen Solar is poised for the kind of growth that could eventually place it among the world's elite class of solar-panel producers.

Yesterday, Evergreen cut the ribbon on a $165 million plant here and announced a five-year contract with Germany's IBC Solar AG, which distributes panels.

The plant is expected to produce more than 780,000 panels annually when it reaches full capacity next year.

"Those solar panels will provide the bulk of energy needed to power more than 23,000 homes," Richard M. Feldt, the company's president and chief executive officer, said during a tour of the facility attended by Gov. Deval Patrick and other officials. "As compared to energy created by coal, solar-panel energy produced by this facility will reduce carbon emissions by 1.2 million metric pounds annually. That is the equivalent to 230,000 cars per year."

Evergreen now has five customers and contracts worth $2.9 billion, enough work to keep the plant busy for the next five years, Feldt said.

Patrick used the occasion to urge utilities in the state to use more solar energy.

"Today I issue a challenge to the utilities that are here and represented here," he said. "Unleash the ingenuities we know that you have present, bring it to bear and let's see a major increase in the capacity of solar capacity by the end of this calendar year."

By early next year, the company expects to have more than 700 employees at the Devens plant, with combined salaries totaling more than $44 million.

At full capacity, the plant will produce enough panels to generate about 160 megawatts of electricity each year, officials said.

That will be enough to make Evergreen one of the premier players in the solar industry, said Jonathan Hoopes, an analyst with ThinkPanure, a SanFrancisco-based research firm.

"The only way that they are going to arrive, so to speak, in the big leagues is when they get their production up over 100 megawatts and show they can grow through their growth plan," he said.

The Devens plant is part of a global strategy for Evergreen.

"We plan on being a worldwide manufacturer and distributor, so we plan on having factories around the world," Feldt said.

The 450,000-square-foot plant, occupying a 10-acre site, features state-of-the-art equipment, such as quad furnaces and proprietary technology, that transforms raw silicon into solar wafers. Those wafers are then processed into solar cells and assembled into solar panels.

"It's the panel that ends up on the rooftop that most of you are familiar with," Feldt said.

The plant will produce about 2 million wafers a week when it reaches full production in about a year, said Craig Core, the plant manager. About 118 3-inch by 6-inch solar cells go into each solar panel, which measure 3 feet by 6 feet, he said.

On the plant floor, the gleaming equipment and robotics look like carnival rides, picking up pieces of glass and silicon before turning, spinning and rearranging them for their assembly process.

Along another point in the manufacturing line, robotic arms snap back and forth, moving wafers.

In the middle of the line are people like Debbie Sandage of Fitchburg and Joy Renda of Gardner, who stand and watch rows of silicon wafers slowly pass, looking for defects or wafers that stick together.

Evergreen expects to have the plant fully operational in the first quarter of 2009. The company also expects to reach profitability in that period.

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Story Source: The Sun (Lowell, Massachusetts)