

Canary Media’s Solar High Rollers column covers utility-scale solar development.
The U.S. solar installation industry is deploying billions of dollars worth of utility-scale and rooftop photovoltaics and is still growing strong despite the headwinds of a pandemic, worker shortages, supply-chain woes and import tariff complexity.
The U.S. solar manufacturing industry is another story. America builds a tiny fraction of the planet’s solar gear and continues to lose market share in the face of China’s scaled-up solar supply giga-complex.
U.S. solar manufacturers have largely lost the battle with China. The U.S. currently has a meager 7.5 gigawatts of PV module production capacity, according to consultancy Wood Mackenzie, out of a global capacity of nearly 400 gigawatts, according to Solarzoom.
Determined U.S. policymakers are working to advance legislation with subsidies and support that might revive domestic solar manufacturing and tap its power as a potential jobs engine.
This month, our Solar High Rollers column takes a look at the ongoing U.S. installation boom and assesses proposed U.S. manufacturing policy and the current difficult landscape.
U.S. solar deployment growth is breathtaking and persistent. Deployments reached 5.7 gigawatts of installed capacity across all market segments in Q2 2021, the largest Q2 figures on record, bringing the total for the first half of 2021 to nearly 11 gigawatts, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie.
With solar now economical in much of the country, installed solar capacity in the U.S. has topped 100 gigawatts, according to the report. The number of solar projects with capacities greater than 100 megawatts is booming across all regions of the U.S.
Texas added 2.5 gigawatts of solar in 2020, surpassing California as the leader in utility-scale solar growth, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Before Texas takes that as a green light to secede, note that California, which added 1.6 gigawatts in 2020, still accounts for the most installed capacity on a cumulative basis with 32 percent of the U.S. total.
Texas is perfect for big solar. Although the state has no renewable portfolio standard, it has Texas sun, lots of land and a competitive energy-only marketplace driven by corporate clean energy buyers and utility offtakers, who are happy to take advantage of the competitive pricing of solar (or solar-plus-storage) compared to other generation sources.
The U.S. played a vital role in the early commercialization of photovoltaics. The country was once a significant producer of PV modules, as well as solar-grade polysilicon and silicon PV wafers and cells.
But global manufacturing leadership shifted to Japan and Germany, and then, overwhelmingly, to China. As of last year, Chinese companies owned more than 60 percent of global capacity across every layer of the supply chain, according to Bloomberg.
The United States has lost approximately 80 percent of its global market share in these industries over the past decade. Its share of module shipments dropped to about 0.5 percent in 2017, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
This seismic shift to Chinese manufacturing is not unique to solar PV modules. China has an industrial policy that provides low-cost power and debt to strategic industries, which then scale rapidly courtesy of an enormous, subsidized and walled-off domestic Chinese market. The occasional use of forced labor is also helpful in keeping manufacturing costs down.
Can the U.S. be a solar-powered nation without a domestic solar supply chain? Can the U.S. solar industry regain its production mojo?
The U.S. solar market has a long history of record growth despite oscillating global economics and politically motivated national energy policy.
Today’s solar market faces a variety of headwinds and turbulence:
These logistics woes are being compounded by, of all things, a ban on coal imports. China recently prohibited shipments of coal from Australia — not for climate reasons, but because of a political dispute. But China’s domestic power demand is growing, so the result has been electricity rationing in industries such as manufacturing of solar cells and modules in Yunnan province as well as aluminum in Guangxi province.
Chinese solar plants have been producing just 10 percent of last year’s output and “some plants have been forced to operate just two days per week, alongside peers in the concrete, steel, lime, and ceramics segments,” according to reporting in pv magazine.
This has led to solar-module supply shortages in Texas. Fossil fuels connect us around the globe in ways we don’t even realize.
Introduced in June, the Solar Energy Manufacturing for America Act (SEMA), sponsored by U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia (D), would create a tax credit for domestic solar production at all steps of the solar module supply chain in order to bring some of that offshore manufacturing back onshore. American manufacturers would be eligible for a generous tax credit of 11 to 18 cents per watt for a solar module manufactured in a U.S.-based vertically integrated plant.
Last month, Ossoff was still pushing hard to have SEMA included in the now-dangling budget reconciliation package, calling it a “generational obligation.” The Georgia senator was joined by an important ally, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon (D), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who said, “We are going to go to the mat for this as part of the reconciliation effort.”
A new poll from left-leaning pollster Data for Progress found bipartisan support for SEMA with 67 percent of likely voters in the U.S. strongly or somewhat supporting the act, according to reporting in The Hill.
While Ossoff was pushing for the inclusion of his legislation in the reconciliation bill, Representative Val Demings (D-Florida) introduced the Reclaiming the Solar Supply Chain Act, with the aim of creating domestic manufacturing jobs while confronting issues related to supply, emissions and human rights concerns in the solar supply chain. This legislation would provide $3.5 billion ($700 million invested annually from 2022 through 2026) for new U.S. solar manufacturing, retooling, retrofitting and expansion.
Here are the top four U.S. solar module manufacturers, according to Solar Power World’s rankings:
Notable solar companies with U.S. manufacturing news:
While the U.S. is equipped with 7.5 gigawatts of total solar panel production on its shores, China’s total solar module capacity is expected to grow to an eye-popping 392 gigawatts by the end of 2021, with total wafer capacity at almost 375 gigawatts, according to Solarzoom.
China’s solar business is going to be operating at a never-before-seen scale to satisfy the needs of its domestic PV market of more than 70 gigawatts per year, as well as the rest of the globe.
A single Chinese manufacturer, Longi, is set to expand to over 100 gigawatts of wafer capacity by the end of 2021.
This is against a backdrop of a Chinese solar complex that has seen boom, bust, bankruptcy and restructuring, along with the fall of premier global brands.
As Vincent Shaw wrote in pv magazine in March, “This time around, production capacity expansion is at a much larger scale and wider scope than ever before. According to one statistical analysis, based on official announcements by Chinese PV companies in 2020, the total invested capital in PV manufacturing exceeded $47 billion.”
Solar gear such as trackers, inverters, glass and backsheets are also expected to see significant capacity expansion, as well as supply-chain stresses.
Research firm IHS Markit warned that it could cut its global solar installation forecasts for 2021 as a result of volatile market conditions and supply-chain struggles.
On the other hand, there’s the possibility of U.S. solar installation and manufacturing accelerating if Congress passes the budget reconciliation bill. That legislation could include market drivers such as extensions of the Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit for solar and wind, direct-pay provisions for the two tax credits, and the creation of a standalone storage investment tax credit.
Wood Mackenzie is leaning toward optimism. It’s forecasting greater than 12 percent year-over-year growth for the global solar industry.
Correction: This article originally misstated the year-over-year growth for the global solar industry as 30 percent, which references the growth for the U.S. only. It has now been updated to reflect the correct information.
Eric Wesoff is the editorial director at Canary Media.