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Area Development - Site Selection, Facility Planning and Workforce Development

New Initiative for Oak Ridge Energy Corridor

02/24/2010
According to IndustryWeek.com, a consortium of researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), community organizations, regional planners, the Department of Energy, and other groups have formally aligned behind the "Oak Ridge Energy Corridor," a regional initiative to aggressively promote multimodal transportation planning, alternatively-fueled mass transit vehicles, and strategically placed recharging facilities for electric and hybrid vehicles. The goal of this diverse group is to show how new technologies - and close cooperation between public and private sectors - can reduce a region's carbon footprint.

It is hoped that this initiative will result in the expansion of the region's energy-related jobs, a trend that got a boost by Confluence Solar's decision last month to build a $200 million, 300-employee manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution facility in Clinton, Tenn., near ORNL. Confluence creates mono-crystal silicon ingots that increase the efficiency and lower the cost of photovoltaics for solar power generation.

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