The jobs are well-paid and offer opportunities to advance quickly, says Bob Keefe, executive director of E2. He recently visited Qcells’s first solar factory in Dalton, Georgia, where he says he spoke with a worker who had been in the carpet industry, along with the rest of his family. The town calls itself the “carpet capital,” but lost thousands of jobs after the Great Recession as the industry contracted. The worker had never gotten a promotion in his carpet factory job, but has already been promoted three times over the past year at Qcells.
