By Dan Kraker

MPR News/90.1 FM

Mountain Iron, Minn., bills itself as the “taconite capital of the world.” It’s home to Minntac, the nation’s largest iron ore mine.

Now the town of fewer than 3,000 has something else to boast about: the opening of the state’s only solar panel factory, and the first to open in the U.S. in 2018.

Heliene opened its first solar panel plant in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, eight years ago. Now, it’s investing more than $18 million to get a 25,000 square foot factory up and running on the Iron Range, after another manufacturer abandoned it last year.

President Martin Pochtaruk gets asked all the time, “Why Mountain Iron?” His answer, he said, is always the same.

“Why not? The same question was asked to me when we started a factory in Sault Ste. Marie. It is a place in need of industrial diversification. It’s a place with viable labor.”

And the state of Minnesota invited him to come, in April, 2017, he said, after the previous occupant, Silicon Energy, closed.

“We were somewhat stuck with a solar manufacturing facility that failed,” said Mark Phillips, commissioner of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation.

Heliene operated the factory with the old equipment for a while. But earlier this year the state of Minnesota authorized $3.5 million in loans to expand the facility and purchase state-of-the-art equipment. IRRRB funded half of the loan, DEED the other half.

Phillips knew it would be tough to lure another manufacturer to Mountain Iron, where mining jobs provide some of the highest paying jobs in the state. That can make attracting workers tough.

“So we feel very fortunate about Heliene coming here, because we had a problem. We had an empty factory. They were shopping for incentives. And we think we did pretty well.”

A centerpiece of the newly refurbished plant is a robotic white arm, equipped with suction cups, that quickly assembles individual solar cells into a grid-like pattern on each module, before the solar panel quickly moves down the automated production line.

“These robots are very accurate, they are very fast, and they are very reliable,” said Pochutaruk.

And very expensive. The German-made machine cost $1.1 million alone.

But the sophisticated equipment has enabled Pochtaruk to open what he calls the most efficient solar panel factory in the country, able to crank out 1,300 panels a day. One panel takes 42 minutes to manufacture from start to finish.

That productivity is part of why Pochtaruk believes Heliene can succeed in Minnesota where other solar panel factories have failed.