Qcells has officially begun commercial production of silicon solar cells at its factory in Cartersville, Georgia, the company said Tuesday. That factory is the largest of its kind in the country — and a long-awaited boost to the U.S. solar supply chain.

For five years straight, the U.S. power sector has built more solar farms than any other kind of power plant. In 2022, the Biden administration crafted industrial policy to ensure as many of those solar panels as possible were made in America. Previously, the U.S. solar manufacturing base had withered in the face of stiff competition from China — but the industrial revival effort worked. In just a few years, the U.S. has opened up enough factories to assemble nearly 70 gigawatts of finished solar panels, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

That’s well beyond what the U.S. installs in a year, but production of the cell — the high-value component that converts sunlight into electricity — has lagged far behind.

Previously, just three other companies made the component in the U.S.: Suniva can produce 1 gigawatt at its cell factory in Georgia, and ES Foundry and Silfab each can make 1 gigawatt in South Carolina. In a few months, Qcells will be able to manufacture 3.3 gigawatts at its cell factory, which would more than double the current operational U.S. solar-cell capacity.

“It’s a great achievement for an industry that had zero active cell capacity in the last couple of years,” said Scott Moskowitz, vice president of market strategy and public affairs at Qcells.

Qcells, once a German solar-cell maker and now a subsidiary of Korean industrial giant Hanwha Group, first announced the Cartersville project in early 2023, pledging to colocate production of four components of the solar supply chain: silicon ingots, wafers, cells, and modules. The module lines went live in 2024. The full facility was originally supposed to open that year, but it took longer to calibrate those more complicated processes. Currently, the full 3.3-gigawatt production of the four solar components is slated for the third quarter.

Another 22 gigawatts of cell capacity is under construction across the U.S., per the Solar Energy Industries Association, though that figure is constantly evolving. On Monday, Japan-headquartered Toyo said it would spend $357 million to add 1.5 gigawatts of cell production at its Houston module-assembly plant. ES Foundry is working to expand its factory to 3 gigawatts by year’s end. T1 Energy is building a cell fab outside Austin. Additionally, First Solar’s U.S. factories produce up to 14 gigawatts of cadmium-telluride thin-film panels, which generate electricity without needing silicon-based cells.

Crucially, potential manufacturing capacity does not equate to production. Silfab, for instance, temporarily closed its cell factory after it accidentally released potassium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid in rapid succession in March. (State authorities found no impact to the surrounding community, including a nearby elementary school.) Compared with the largely mechanical work of robotically assembling all the pieces into a finished panel, etching silicon wafers into cells is heavy industrial work that involves potent chemicals and other cleanup concerns.

“You’re leveraging complicated science to create a solar cell that generates electricity,” Moskowitz said. ​“There are more steps to the process, and the steps are more intensive.”

The giant, L-shaped Cartersville site houses ​“four factories in one,” he noted. At one end, polysilicon gets melted into ingots, and the pieces move sequentially through the discrete steps until complete panels roll off the line at the other end of the building. Between this factory and the module assembly operation about 30 miles north in Dalton, Georgia, Qcells expects to employ 3,800 people in the region doing high-tech, robot-assisted manufacturing.

Developers who use domestically produced cells can more easily qualify for the domestic-content tax credit bonus. Qcells also earns a higher manufacturing tax credit for each cell that it makes. These policies arose in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, which was intended to spur a U.S. manufacturing renaissance for clean energy. The Trump administration subsequently phased out the credit for installing solar projects after July 4, but projects can still claim the credits for four years under ​“safe harbor” rules.

Once the safe-harbored projects get built or fall through, developers will lose the major financial incentive to buy American cells and panels rather than look for the cheapest imports that can get past the U.S. tariff regime. Domestic production does, however, offer a potentially winning story for developers to tell to skeptical communities or political leaders. It also insulates their project timelines from disruptions in foreign trade, as seen during Covid, or the current surge in shipping costs linked to the U.S. war with Iran.

The future is hard to predict, but for now, demand for electricity production is higher than it has been in a generation. The tech giants building AI have become obsessed with ​“speed to power,” and it’s hard to imagine a faster way to achieve that than to order solar panels that arrive on a truck straight from the factory.

Julian Spector

is a senior reporter at Canary Media. He reports on batteries, long-duration energy storage, low-carbon hydrogen, and clean energy breakthroughs around the world.