http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/ConeDriveSolar.mp3
A Traverse City company is involved in what's expected to be the world's largest solar energy project. Cone Drive is cranking out parts for a solar array being constructed in California's Mojave Desert.
Top Bid
The company won the contract in a highly competitive global market. It comes at a time when some see the U.S. solar sector as faltering. But Cone Drive is confident this project will open up new opportunities.
Worm Gears
Cone Drive is all about gears. That is, a certain type called worm gears that mesh at right angles to each other.
A man named Samuel Cone, a machinist in the Navy, developed the technology in Virginia back in the mid 1920's. Later he licensed it to Michigan Tool in Detroit. Eventually that company opened a plant in Traverse City in 1950.
Roberta Wagner is the manager for Cone Drive Solar. She says these gears allow machines to operate at lower speeds but with more force. "They literally can go into anything. Elevators, escalators, steel production, big tilt ladles," she says. "It's such a diverse variety of applications that you can use this product for."
New Application
Wagner says solar is not only a new venture for the company. It's also a new application of worm gearing technology. And Wagner says that means companies developing solar energy are taking a kind of leap of faith. "Because they're asking this industry to do something it's never done before," she says. "And being successful at it is not a guarantee because it's not your typical business model."
The Project
Cone Drive is supplying worm gears for BrightSource Energy. The California based solar power company is building what it says is the world's largest solar project.
It's an array of thousands of mirrors, controlled by computers that track the sun as it moves across the sky. And instead of converting sunlight to electricity, as solar panels do, the mirrors focus solar energy to heat water and convert it to steam to drive turbines.
For this project, Cone Drive is cranking out thousands of gear boxes, each precisely the same. Sue Brown is the quality control engineer. Basically, she says, the company converted a section of its Traverse City plant for mass production and hired about 20 new people.
"We have a complete new crew out there for machinist assemblers," Brown says. "The assembly line is different. Normally we do manual builds. And this is all automated assembly lines so it was a lot of new training for everyone."
Solar Future Uncertain?
But these days there's a cloud over whether the solar industry in the U.S is going to survive. Several large manufacturers of solar equipment recently have gone out of business.
Keith Schneider follows renewable energy issues and writes for the New York Times and other outlets. He says both U.S. and global markets for solar energy are rapidly growing. "Now within the manufacturing, design, innovation sector highly competitive," Schneider says. "And the Chinese in particular, but also the Germans and others, are developing good equipment at a cost that is putting American companies on edge and some of them are failing."
The most publicized failure is a company called Solyndra. And there's a plant near Midland owned by Evergreen Solar that also went belly-up.
But Schneider doesn't think all U.S. solar companies are going to fail. What's uncertain, he says, is what method of producing solar energy will prevail.
But for now, he notes, there are several more projects using the technology that Cone Drive is building for BrightSource Energy. "But for the next couple three four years I think that Cone will have plenty of business because they're building these big plants out west," Schneider says.
BrightSource says its Ivanpah installation in a dry lake bed of the Mojave Desert will offset greenhouse gases equivalent to taking 7,000 cars off the road.
Cone Drive Outlook
For its part, Roberta Wagner says, Cone Drive is pretty proud to be the only U.S. gear manufacturer that's part of the project. "So for us personally, this was really a great opportunity and such a great feeling that we were successful in being competitive and bringing new jobs to the Traverse City area," she says. "It was excellent. We're all still very elated about it."
Wagner won't confirm whether the Traverse City manufacturer has more solar contracts pending. But she says the company expects to keep all the new jobs and the production line going far into the future.