Qcells bags $1.45bn DOE loan for solar manufacturing facility

America's renewable domestic supply chain is getting a new solar ingot and wafer plant, thanks to Qcells and a massive conditional loan from the Department of Energy (DOE).

The factory will be the first fully integrated silicon-based solar manufacturing facility constructed in the United States in more than a decade.

As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Investing in America agenda, the DOE’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) has announced a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee of up to $1.45 billion to Qcells, an EPC service provider and one of the country's largest (and only) PV manufacturers.

Offered through LPO’s Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Program, the loan guarantee will support a solar supply chain facility in Cartersville, Georgia, which will produce ingots, wafers, cells, and finished solar panels.

First announced in January 2023, the facility will be the largest ingot and wafer plant ever built in the US and will reestablish critical parts of the domestic solar supply chain by reshoring production capacity for components that are now mostly produced in China and Southeast Asia.

Qcells will make larger-format wafer sizes for both distributed and utility-scale projects that lower costs and increase product performance. Once fully operational, the facility is expected to produce 3.3GW of solar panels per year, enough to supply panels to half a million American households.

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The Cartersville project is expected to create approximately 1,200 construction jobs and will support, upon completion, 1,950 local full-time operations jobs. According to a recent economic review provided by the Cartersville-Bartow County Department of Economic Development, this investment will indirectly create nearly 6,800 jobs in Georgia’s Bartow and Whitfield Counties and has a potential sales output of more than $2 billion.

Qcells’ other solar factory, opened in 2019, is located one hour north of the facility site in Dalton, Georgia. The experience gained from operating the Dalton facility, which was recently expanded to produce a total of 5.1GW of solar panels per year, will benefit this new project. Qcells expects to manufacture about 10,000 panels per year from the two facilities combined.

Benefitting from tex credits

The Cartersville facility will benefit from the Section 45 Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit, also known as 45X, created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivises domestic manufacturing at each step of the solar supply chain. Newly released data shows that more than 3.4 million American families benefitted from $8.4 billion in Inflation Reduction Act tax credits in 2023.

Developers that utilise it will qualify for the IRA's domestic content bonus for clean energy production and investment tax credits. Since the IRA’s passage, more than 325GW of manufacturing capacity has been announced across the solar supply chain, representing more than 31,000 potential jobs and nearly $16 billion in announced investments across 111 new facilities or expansions, per DOE.

Qcells is one of the ten largest utility-scale project developers for both solar and storage in the United States, with more than 2GW of projects developed or constructed and a project development pipeline of 10+ GW. Earlier this year, the company entered into an 8-year, 12GW solar and engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) agreement with Microsoft to be fulfilled with solar panels made in Cartersville. 

In June, commercial solar company Summit Ridge Energy announced an expansion of its partnership with Qcells, committing to purchase an additional 800MW of solar panels. The agreement builds upon an existing 1.2GW deal announced in April of last year by Vice President Kamala Harris at Qcells’ Dalton manufacturing facility, where most of those newly procured panels will be made. Summit Ridge and Qcells are now committed to 2GW, which the companies are billing as “the largest domestic community solar purchase in history," which the former says will help develop more than 100 new community solar projects.

Qcells' new manufacturing plant will benefit residents of Cartersville (located about 43 miles from Atlanta) and other nearby communities. Approximately 40 to 50% of the construction work has been awarded to local contractors, including contractors from Atlanta, Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee. The construction contractor is also partnering with Kennesaw State University in Georgia to hire recent construction management graduates. Qcells Georgia plans to offer job training and apprenticeships to local Cartersville residents who face barriers to employment.

While this conditional commitment indicates DOE’s intent to finance the project, DOE and the company must satisfy certain technical, legal, environmental, and financial conditions before the Department enters into definitive financing documents and funds the loan.

Originally published by Paul Gerke on renewableenergyworld.com