Listed on the NASDAQ as CSIQ, Canada-headquartered solar PV manufacturer Canadian Solar has announced a solar cell manufacturing plant in the US with 5 GW annual installed capacity. This one will be located in Jeffersonville, Indiana.
Solar cells produced at the fab will feed the company's previously announced 5 GW module assembly plant in Mesquite, Texas (see Texas It Is For Canadian Solar). For this, it has already secured a 7 GW long-term order from EDF Renewables North America (see Huge TOPCon Order For Canadian Solar Modules In US).
To be built for an investment of over $800 million, the cell fab at the River Ridge Commerce Center represents close to 20,000 high-power modules/day. It is scheduled to come online by the end of 2025.
"Establishing this factory is a key milestone that will enable us to better serve our US customers with the most advanced technology in the industry," said Canadian Solar's Senior Vice President Thomas Koerner. "This is the second of the anticipated long-term investments we expect to make in the US as we think strategically about a local, sustainable and clean energy supply chain and to fulfill the long-term requirements of the local-content rules of the recently established IRA."
Canadian Solar's 5 GW cell fab announcement is likely to give the market a major boost especially since it is mostly module manufacturing that's on the radar of companies interested in availing the benefits of local manufacturing under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Between August 2022 and August 2023, the one year of the IRA saw manufacturing announcements for 85.1 GW of module capacity, while cell capacity added up to 43.2 GW. Further upstream manufacturing of silicon ingots and wafers is limited with 19.6 GW, as per the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) (see Inflation Reduction Act For Solar: Report Card).
Recently, Suniva, the company responsible for bringing in trade tariffs under Section 201, said it was restarting its silicon solar cell fab in Georgia and will scale it up to 2.5 GW (see IRA Breathes Life Into Shuttered US Solar Factory).