‘Uncle Bob’ is that proverbial character who shares at family holidays all he believes to be true about solar and why it just isn’t a good idea. Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of Nextracker, has had this experience. Based on his 33 years in the solar industry, he offers short, fact-based responses to Uncle Bob’s assertions, which range from “solar is taking coal jobs to “solar is unreliable”. In this part one of the series, Shugar debunks the myth that “all those solar panels are made in China”.
Uncle Bob may have said at Thanksgiving dinner, “well, all these solar panels, they’re coming from China”.
How do you respond? “That’s wrong,” Shugar says. “You say I love you, Uncle Bob. But that’s not what’s happening.”
The facts are:
- The largest manufacturer of solar panels for the United States is a U.S. company that was started over 20 years ago called First Solar and headquartered in Arizona.
- Now in addition to First Solar, over 18 solar panel factories in the United States are manufacturing to meet U.S. demand.
- After the Inflation Reduction Act legislation was passed in 2022, there have been over 50 new solar panel factory announcements, representing over $14 billion of investment.
- Solar, by the way, was invented in the U.S. by Bell Labs in the 50s. And it’s great to see a resurgence of manufacturing activity in the United States.
Episode 1
For more on domestic manufacturing, read How the IRA is changing the U.S. solar manufacturing landscape.
We’ll continue this series with fact-based responses to additional myths such as: What about when the sun doesn’t shine? What about nuclear–that’s clean and reliable? And solar sounds great, but it’s too expensive. Right? Solar takes too much land. There’s gonna be no room for farms if we have solar panels.
Stay tuned as we unpack these objections, so you’re ready for next Thanksgiving dinner (or other dinner parties) with Uncle Bob.
Dan Shugar is founder and CEO of Nextracker. For over 30 years, he has been a leading voice in business, technology and climate policy, advancing solar and climate technology solutions in the U.S. and around the globe. He has numerous patents and published 50 technical papers. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA).
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
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Assuming Uncle Bob is well-informed, he will respond as follows:
1. In 2023, the U.S. installed about 33GW solar. (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/chart-the-us-installed-more-solar-in-2023-than-ever-before)
2. In 2023, the U.S. imported about 49GW modules (in the first 11 months of the year). (https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2024/02/usitcs-midterm-report-on-sec-201-solar-tariffs-heads-to-president)
3. In 2023, total U.S. module manufacturing capacity was about 6GW. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1422330/solar-panel-manufacturing-companies-united-states/)
I am very glad that the US is increasing its module manufacturing capacity. But in 2023, the U.S. imported nearly 9 times as many modules as it has capacity to manufacture. So, Uncle Bob’s got a point.
But it is a silly point. Increasing solar installation should be the real point. Unless foreign manufacture is hurting U.S. manufacture due to selling at below its manufacturing costs (and until such time as we have the sense to enforce carbon taxes, pollution laws, and workers safety laws on imports), this is legit, it helps solar installation, and there are 100 other industries you could point to where there is little or no U.S. manufacture.
A well informed Uncle Bob would further know that the U.S. has 0GW domestic ingot/wafer, c-Si cell and c-Si solar glass capacity. So, c-Si modules “made in America” are really just “assembled in America” from up to 100% of imported components. There is 1 domestic Al frame supplier and a small domestic back sheet and filler sheet capacity. Junction boxes, cables and connectors are also mostly imported. And finally, most of the deployed CdTe modules are imported from Vietnam, Malaysia and now India.
If we talk about debunking we need to stay intellectually honest so we can actually initiate change towards a more resilient PV supply chain and not continue to remain dependent on a single geographic region for PV modules.