Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is scheduled to join officials of Sediver USA in West Memphis Friday to mark the opening of a new factory linked to the clean energy industry.

Sediver and its French parent company Seves Group have invested $15 million to build an advanced manufacturing facility to supply toughened glass insulators for high-voltage electrical transmission lines.

It began production this month with 30 employees and is expected to eventually employ more than 75.

Sediver agreed to build the Arkansas plant as part of a preferred supplier agreement with Houston-based Clean Line Energy. Sediver would be in position to supply insulators for the $2 billion Plains & Eastern Clean Line project.

The 720-mile line would transmit wind-powered electricity from the Oklahoma Panhandle across Arkansas to near Millington, where it would connect to the Tennessee Valley Authority power grid.

Clean Line Energy has been working to acquire right of way for the line and to win commitments from utilities to buy its output of 4,000 megawatts of wind power.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has been a leading critic of the line and has urged the TVA not to buy electricity from it. Alexander maintains wind power is too expensive and that the TVA region won’t need the extra capacity for the foreseeable future. Alexander is a senior member of the Senate energy subcommittee.

Clean energy proponents have disputed Alexander’s arguments about wind power and described the Clean Line as the type of big, job-creating infrastructure project that America needs.

Sediver was hiring and training employees through the end of March and began production with one shift. It anticipates adding a second shift this summer and third shift sometime later.

The plant is in Mid-America Industrial Park off Interstate 40.

Also slated to participate in the 10 a.m. ribbon cutting are Sediver USA chairman and Seves Group chief executive officer Peter Baumgartner, Seves chairman Joakim Olsson and West Memphis plant general manager William Tucker.