By JONATHAN JENKINS, Queen's Park Bureau, Toronto Sun

Last Updated: March 2, 2010 6:00am

Move over Samsung, the Germans are coming.

Bosch Solar Energy, a subsidiary of the giant Stuttgart-based manufacturer, is teaming up with a Calgary firm to take advantage of Ontario’s Green Energy Act, the two companies announced Tuesday.

“We’ll be putting out a premier - highest quality, highest warranty, highest bankability - product into the marketplace, in terms of commercial and institutional rooftop (solar) systems,” Robert Bucher, president and CEO of Calgary’s Sustainable Energy Technologies.

“We’ll be providing a complete, turn-key product into the Ontario marketplace.”

Global giant Samsung - with a $473 million sweetener from the Ontario government, announced in January it would be spending $7 billion to build 2,500 megawatts of wind generation and four factories in Ontario over the next 20 years.

Sustainable Energy just moved the manufacture of its low-voltage solar inverters to a plant in the Cambridge area earlier this year.

Bucher says the inverters, which can be used with any solar photovoltaic panels, are safer and easier to use than other products and will be ideal for use with

the thin-film panels Bosch will be producing here.

“This will be the first thin-film product in the market place,” Bucher said. “Thin film is perfect for buildings in a temperate zone because it basically gets the best energy yield for light that comes in at an angle. It also doesn’t require any major racking.

“(With thin film) you get very good yields, very low costs.”

The two companies expect to hire between 400 to 600 people by 2011.

The goal is to produce rooftop systems of 50 to 500 KW capacity for commercial and institutional buildings, which could earn up to 71.3 cents a KWH under the Green Energy Act’s Feed-in-Tariff prices, depending on their size.

Bucher said the partners are hoping to produce systems that will cost less than $6 a KW to install, which he said would be less than competitors.

“People are looking at getting the financiers and the solar developers behind solar systems,” he said. “Well you’ve got to have a product that is going to last 20 years, and with the Bosch name you have that. It’s guaranteed. We think this is the best panel in the business and it has the best warranty in the business.”

Unlike Samsung though, neither Bosch nor Sustainable is getting any money from the Ontario government.

“We have talked to them, unsuccessfully as yet. But we continue to work withthem, both energy and economic development,” Bucher said.

Despite that, Bucher said his firm - lured here by the Green Energy Act - has high hopes for Premier Dalton McGuinty’s plan to build a new manufacturing sector in Ontario that can supply the United States with renewably energy technology and equipment.

“We believe in that entirely,” he said. “I believe it’s still a couple of years out and it will all depend on the success of the Ontario market place.

If the U.S. states look north and say they did what they intended - they created the jobs - that’s the key piece. If they create the jobs and the jobs stick, I believe the U.S. will follow Ontario’s lead.”