Large-Scale Production of Solar Panels Planned

Burnishing metro Toledo’s reputation as a budding center of low cost solar energy technology, a private group plans to begin large-scale production of solar panels in Perrysburg this summer.

Willard & Kelsey Solar Group LLC expects to produce 1 million to 1.5 million panels a year, starting in July, in a former television components plant in Perrysburg, according to documents filed with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Reached at the 262,000-square-foot factory on Progress Drive, off State Rt. 25, Lynn Sherman, environmental quality manager, declined to comment.

Michael Cicak, a veteran of the solar energy industry locally who is leading the investment group behind the project, did not respond to a message left at his residence.

Two other solar-panel plants are either operating or under way in metro Toledo. Phoenix-based First Solar Inc., which last year had the fastest growing stock on Wall Street, produces more than 2 million panels a year at its lone U.S. plant off Cedar Park Boulevard in Perrysburg. Most of the two-foot by four-foot panels are shipped overseas to commercial solar installations.

Xunlight Corp., led by a researcher from the University of Toledo, plans to begin panel production this year at a factory off Nebraska Avenue in Toledo.

And a unit of Q-Cells AG, the German solar giant that is Europe’s largest manufacturer of solar panels, has teamed up with a local firm to operate a research and development center in Perrysburg that specializes in new technology that holds promise of reducing production costs.

Leading researchers told The Blade last year that Toledo is a top center internationally for research and manufacturing involving the technology, which produces panels using sheets of glass and the compound cadmium telluride as a semiconductor.

Industry boosters credit Toledo’s history as a glass-manufacturing center and the research of the late Harold McMaster, whose pioneering work with solar panels attracted the interest of retailing billionaire John Walton.

Mr. Cicak, of Willard & Kelsey Solar Group, worked with Mr. McMaster in the 1980s and 1990s in an early solar panel venture.

Documents filed with the Ohio EPA and the Ohio secretary of state do not identify other investors in the new project. The origin of the firm’s name is unclear. But Willard Street and Kelsey Avenue is an intersection in East Toledo near where Mr. Cicak lived as a youth.

The plant, to be located in the former Delafoil Inc. factory, will operate around the clock, producing 240 panels an hour, according to the firm’s filing at the EPA.

Willard & Kelsey submitted the application as part of a permit for permission to operate a manufacturing line. However, it is unclear if emissions will be great enough to require a permit, said Mohammad Smidi, of the agency’s office in Bowling Green. Either way, its application is unlikely to be turned down, he said.

Company officials have told Perrysburg officials they expect to have a payroll of $12 million to $13 million annually. But they haven’t said how many people the factory will employ, said John Alexander, city administrator.

Contact Gary Pakulski at: gpakulski@theblade.com or 419-724-6082.

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