U.S. Energy Department Offers $1.45 Billion Loan Guarantee for Solar Supply Chain Facility

The U.S. Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office on Aug. 8 announced a conditional loan guarantee commitment of up to $1.45 billion to QCells, a crystalline silicon solar manufacturer, to support a solar supply chain facility in Cartersville, Georgia. The facility would be capable of producing 3.3 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels annually, which has the potential to slash more than 5 million tons of CO2 emissions per year.

In January 2023, QCells announced it would allocate $2.5 billion for a complete solar supply chain in the U.S., which marked the largest investment in the U.S. solar industry at the time. The company is involved in both solar and storage projects in the U.S., with over 10 GW of projects in the pipeline. QCells, headquartered in South Korea and owned by Hanwha Solutions, is a leading manufacturer of crystalline silicon solar panels.

Qcells’ Cartersville plant will produce ingots, wafers, solar cells, and finished solar panels in one facility, making it the first vertically integrated solar manufacturing plant in the U.S. in over a decade. The company will produce larger-format wafer sizes to cut costs and improve efficiency.

QCells also has a manufacturing facility in Dalton, Georgia, established in 2019. Last year, QCells completed its third factory expansion in Dalton, bringing the total annual production capacity to 5.1 GW of solar panels. With the two plants in Dalton and Cartersville, the company estimates that its annual production capacity will reach 8.4 GW in 2024, which could power approximately 1.3 million households every year.

The loan guarantee is a part of the Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Program, which offers financing for cutting-edge supply chain projects in the energy industry. The financial commitment is a part of many strategies to boost the domestic solar supply chain. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit incentivizes manufacturing across the solar supply chain. Panels produced at the Cartersville plant would also help solar developers avail the domestic content bonus for clean energy production and investment tax credits under the act. The bonus credit would encourage purchase of domestically-manufactured products and components. More than 325 GW of manufacturing capacity has been announced across the solar supply chain since the passage of the act.

In April, the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee filed anti-dumping petitions pertaining to imports of crystalline silicon PV cells from certain Southeast Asian countries.