"If we can bend sheet metal for car fenders, we can bend it for windmills," said Ken Horn, a Republican state representative from hard-hit Saginaw.
A tavern owner, Horn said his regulars had been buzzing about green energy -- a sign that the industry was no longer considered fringe or radical.
Michigan's brightest renewable stars are in solar. United Solar Ovonic, a major producer of thin-film photovoltaics, operates three manufacturing facilities in Michigan and has two more under construction in the state.
Hemlock Semiconductor is a joint venture of two Japanese firms and Midland, Mich.-based Dow Corning Corp., which owns a majority stake.
It is expanding its rural campus not far from Saginaw and building a plant in Tennessee to produce more polycrystalline silicon -- a semiconductor that allows solar cells to convert sunlight into electricity.
The exacting chemical process begins with the mining of quartz and ends with huge, gray, U-shaped bars of polycrystalline silicon wheeled to an assembly line at Hemlock's Michigan plant, where they're broken into small chunks for shipment.
Most of the product is sent to Asia and Europe, where solar manufacturers turn it into the familiar panels seen on rooftops. Hemlock employs 1,400 full-time and contract workers in Michigan and expects to add 500 more in the next few years. The plant operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, never stopping, even in a recent blizzard.
Snow and ice couldn't keep Rich Steudemann from sliding into work on a recent morning. A mechanical engineer with more than two decades in the auto industry, Steudemann jumped at the chance to join Hemlock last fall as a quality-control expert.
"This is like the era of Henry Ford," said Steudemann, 45. "This industry is just starting to take off."
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marla.dickerson@latimes.com
