A manufacturing facility slated to open at month's end will create 200 "green jobs" in the region, and could employ up to 300 people when it is running full-bore.

Flabeg Solar US Corp., a new subsidiary of German glass finishing firm Flabeg GmBH, is building the 230,000-square-foot plant in Clinton Commerce Park in Findlay to make solar mirrors for power stations that use sunlight to generate electricity.

Flabeg Solar's mirrors will be used in two types of solar power plants. The first type uses an array of flat mirrors to reflect sunlight toward a receiver placed on a tower. The second uses a chain of parabolic mirrors whose curved surfaces focus sunlight on a tube, thus heating oil that flows through it.

Construction on the cavernous facility began in March, but Flabeg Solar began local operations in January.

"We started with two people in one room," in a temporary office in Green Tree's Foster Plaza, said President Jochen Meyer. Since then the company has operated in "startup mode."

"You do 14-hour days, you improvise, you keep things going, you find solutions."

Mr. Meyer said the company already has contracts to deliver half a million mirrors for power stations in United Arab Emirates capital Abu Dhabi and in Spain, but is "a little behind what we expected" in winning a contract in the United States.

"A lot of people are standing in the starting blocks," he said. They're waiting to see what incentives are included in the next energy bill to be signed into law.

That wait-and-see stance belies the history of solar: Although Spain and Germany have led the growth of solar energy in recent years, a solar facility built in California's Mojave Desert in the late 1980s remains the world's largest. Solar Energy Generating Systems, a complex of nine power plants, uses nearly a million mirrors spread over 1,600 acres to create a total installed capacity of 354 megawatts.

Flabeg provided the Solar Energy Generating Systems mirrors 25 years ago. The company is building a U.S. plant because it wants to be positioned when the solar energy market takes off again. "We expect the U.S. market to grow substantially in the next five years," he said.

Plants in the United States also cost less than plants in Europe, he said, so building one here will "improve our overall global cost position."

So far, the staff has grown from two to about 25, largely engineers. Over the next 18 months, the company will hire both skilled and unskilled manufacturing workers to fill out its work force. Mr. Meyer declined to give a salary range for the new hires, but said, "We have put together a very competitive package which includes a number of benefits."

He also said that the compensation system "rewards personal growth as well as personal performance," with opportunities for advancement.

When the plant is finished, most workers there will not actually handle the mirror glass -- that will fall largely to a platoon of 22 robots. Three 400-foot assembly lines will push giant plates of glass through a process in which they are heated up to 1,500 degrees Farenheit and layered with silver copper and three coats of paint before being shipped out.

The Clinton facility will be able to produce up to 4,000 mirrors a day, enough to fill a dozen 20-ton trucks.

With that much glass being toted around, what happens when it breaks? Untreated glass is simply recycled, but fragments of treated glass call for disposal by a company that specializes in hazardous waste.

"It will not end up on your normal landfill," Mr. Meyer said.

Mr. Meyer said that while other states offered more aggressive packages than the $9 million that Flabeg received from Pennsylvania to get the facility, time considerations tilted the decision toward the Pittsburgh region.

"We were really under the gun to get this facility up and running as fast as possible," he said. "Clinton Commerce Park was pretty much pre-developed and we had all the right things in place so that we could get off the ground pretty fast."

It didn't hurt that parent company Flabeg was familiar with the area, having long had a subsidiary in Brackenridge that makes automotive mirrors. In a development reflecting larger changes in the U.S. economy, the Flabeg Automotive US Corp. laid off 65 workers in March, even as Flabeg Solar was rushing to complete its new plant.

Time was a factor in another sense: Being in the eastern time zone means that Pittsburgh is only six hours behind Germany, making it easier to share a workday with German offices. Placing a factory on the West Coast would have created a situation where "one team is leaving the office as the other team is getting into the office."

The building's design incorporates elements meant to foster what Mr. Meyer called "a very integrative culture." For instance, offices are designed for at least two people because "our culture is to work in teams." In similar fashion, the canteen and gym will have no separate spaces for executives, to de-emphasize hierarchy.

"We really want to make this a model factory," he said, "with everybody working hard, thinking and being proud of our success."

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