[Johnny Ryall]

Mississippi governor says Senatobia to get solar panel manufacturing facility, 500 jobs
the Commercial Appeal | By Staff

SENATOBIA, Miss. -- For the second time in three weeks, northwest Mississippi reeled in a 500-job, high-tech manufacturing facility with the announcement Friday that a solar technology company will build a plant in Senatobia. Gov. Haley Barbour and Rep. Travis Childers, D-Miss., backed by Senatobia and Tate County officials, announced at Northwest Mississippi Community College that Twin Creeks Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based operation with manufacturing sites in Boston and San Jose, Calif., had chosen Senatobia from among 25 sites to build solar panels.

Senatobia, about 30 miles south of Memphis, joins another site in the region jumping aboard the solar technology bandwagon. Tennessee officials have approved buying 200 acres in Haywood County, about 40 miles northeast of Memphis, where they plan to erect a "solar farm" with an array of solar panels. Memphis already is home to one of the nation's largest solar manufacturers in the Sharp Electronics Corp. plant on Mendenhall. The facility produces enough solar panels to generate 140 megawatts of power and in the past year increased its workforce from 300 to 480.

The Senatobia plans call for a 250,000-square-foot, $175 million production facility that will employ 512 workers in two phases over the next five years. That's good news in Tate County, where the most recent unemployment rate was 13.1 percent in February. The facility will be located in Senatobia's industrial park, and most of the jobs created should go to area workers, Mayor Alan Callicott said.

Barbour, who was in Tunica County on March 10 to announce that German pipe manufacturer Wilh. Schulz GMBH would open a 500-job plant there, sounded a similar tone Friday in trumpeting the area's growing reputation as an international competitor for high-tech jobs. "After looking at more than 25 sites, including sites in Asia, they've decided the best place in the world to manufacture solar panels is Senatobia, Miss.," Barbour said. "This facility will be the first renewable solar technology production plant in the state."

University of Mississippi Chancellor Dan Jones touted the Center for Excellence in Manufacturing on his school's nearby Oxford campus and the symbiotic relationship he hopes will develop between that program and Twin Creeks as the state moves away from furniture manufacturing jobs to high-tech, high-paying endeavors. This project will help improve energy consumption down the road for those of us in this country ... and your coming will help move this state forward," Jones said.

A timetable wasn't outlined, but Twin Creeks CEO Siva Sivaram said he hopes to break ground "rapidly" on a plant that was given a boost by loan assistance totaling $50 million through the Mississippi Major Economic Impact Authority. The state and the city of Senatobia also will provide $4 million for infrastructure improvements at the plant site.

The company, which was founded in 2008 and holds a portfolio of more than 50 patents, uses what it says is a unique manufacturing process to produce photovoltaic solar panels that it hopes will become a growing alternative energy source. By the numbers; 512: Projected number of employees at the new solar plant. $175 million: Cost of the new plant. 250,000: Size of the facility in square feet. 50: Number of patents held by Twin Creeks Technologies