German expert sees holes in Oregon energy saving

Tag: electricity saver

In their German hometown, Gunter Erfurt and his wife, Anja, could walk most everywhere. Their Mercedes-Benz ran on vegetable oil, and a geothermal pump heated their house.

But in February, the solar company manager, his wife, a geologist, and their two small children said goodbye, for a time, to the comforts they'd carefully cultivated in their native country to take on a new opportunity.

Now in Hillsboro, Gunter Erfurt, who's 35 and has a physics Ph.D., leads SolarWorld Group's development of a manufacturing plant that the company projects will be the highest-producing solar plant in North America by 2009. It is expected to eventually make enough solar cells to provide power for the equivalent of 100,000 Oregonians every year.

Hillsboro's established high-tech work force, skilled in the same kind of silicon technology that solar companies use, attracted SolarWorld to the city. But while the computer industry traditionally has drawn researchers and engineers from Asian nations, Erfurt is perhaps on the leading edge of a wave of transplants to come from Europe to work in solar, said Hillsboro economic development director Larry Pederson.

As Erfurt speaks about solar energy and his work, his excitement -- and the pace at which he rattles off figures and dates -- never lets up.

"It's a huge chance," he says of the burgeoning sustainable revolution in the United States.

The Erfurts are impressed by the green ethos they've seen in Oregon, but they also wonder:

Where are all the simple fixes that Europeans seem to have institutionalized long ago? The curbside compost pickup? The diesel cars?

"The Americans, I would say, they have never been really forced to change," Gunter Erfurt said.

SolarWorld, based in Bonn, Germany, was founded in 1998 with a handful of employees. Now it is one of the largest solar manufacturing companies in the world, ranking seventh-highest in energy capacity in 2007, according to PHOTON International magazine. SolarWorld has about 2,000 employees worldwide and had sales last year of about $1 billion.