Focus on domestic content boosts solar executive’s confidence

Eric Goodwin, vice president for business development for solar mounting-system manufacturer OMCO Solar, said in an interview with pv magazine USA that he enjoys the rare extra confidence of working in the solar industry for a 70-year-old U.S. manufacturer.

Family-owned parent company OMCO Holdings began in 1955, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and Bill Haley and his Comets were topping out the pop music charts – and more than 30 years before solar technology entered U.S. commercial markets. OMCO celebrates its seven-decade milestone in August as a manufacturer of steel products.

Founded in 2007, OMCO Solar is a steel-fabrication company, too – but also very much a solar-industry player. It uses steel to manufacture its own fixed-tilt mounting systems and single-axis trackers and, on a contract basis, solar-installation back rails.

OMCO Holdings, based in Wickliffe, Ohio, has always focused on domestic production. OMCO Solar always, based in Phoenix, Ariz., has done so as well. The company estimates it has produced solar products totaling 11 GW of capacity.

OMCO Solar installation.
Image: Aerial Agents
*Image: OMCO*

“The domestic content piece is a very big advantage for us,” Goodwin said.

Plus, industry conditions increasingly seem to be developing to further favor domestic production, sharpening the company’s U.S.-made competitive edge.

Over recent years, federal tax incentives have rewarded developers’ use and factory output of domestically manufactured solar gear. Now, the OMCO Solar division also hopes that a final congressional budget bill expected to be voted on in coming months will feature new rules barring so-called foreign entity of concern companies, most often Chinese solar firms, from tapping the tax incentives.

“It could end up being a very big competitive advantage for us,” Goodwin said.

To accentuate OMCO Solar’s domestic differentiation, the company is preparing to offer mounting systems that are 100% built from components made in OMCO’s domestic factories and supplied by its domestic suppliers.

OMCO’s long U.S. history and domestic-production strategy perfectly suit Goodwin, who’s invested 8 ½ years of his career in the company. By background, he’s actually a manufacturing-operations and supply-chain leader, whether in the aerospace, automotive or gaming industries – but not a sales person. “This is my first and only sales job,” he said.

Yet, Goodwin said his background in the nitty-gritty oversight of operational functions has been “very helpful” in leveraging trust and confidence within the more relationship-intensive work of business development.

“I’m having a heck of time,” Goodwin said, partly because the next six months promise to bring the most consequential evolution of the industry in the 16 years he’s worked in solar. “I love what I’m doing right now.”

In keeping with his external corporate orientation, Goodwin also has gone macro by steeping himself in how federal policy shapes solar. For 2 ½ years, he’s even served on the company’s seat on the board of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

This year, he’s particularly monitoring several policy and business developments affecting OMCO Solar’s industry segment:

Federal budget-reconciliation initiatives framing the future of pivotal investment and manufacturing tax credits, sales (or “transferability”) of those incentives to third parties and the incentives’ potentially accelerated sunset timelines.
AI’s emergence in optimizing design, forecasting, installation, maintenance, monitoring, robotics, simulation and tracking– not to mention its vast surge in electrical demand to power data centers.
The advent of agrivoltaics in managing dual land use, shading and environmental challenges in combining solar with agriculture.
The impact of recently heightened steel prices and interest rates on the volume of solar business.

Within the big-picture outlook, Goodwin considers his own top mandates to be:

More substantially enter OMCO Solar into the estimated $1.5-billion-in-annual-sales utility-scale tracker market (roughly projects above 50 megawatts) and gradually elevate its market share from second-tier footing into the top tier.
Build on its roughly 40% market share in the estimated $1 billion market for fixed-tilt systems, which best serve projects of virtually all sizes on uneven terrain.
Keep growing OMCO’s participation in the distributed-generation market (projects smaller than 10 MW) to rise into the ranks of the top four providers in the segment’s tracker business.

As industry peers have wrung their hands about segment and industry challenges, Goodwin is heartened by the flow of fresh blood that always seems to course into the industry’s human circulatory system, he said. When SEIA President Abigail Ross Hopper polled a crowd attending the RE+ Texas trade show in March about how many attendees were new to the show, half or more raised their hands. “It was good to see,” he said.

Goodwin recalled the thrills of one of his own early industry tours as a project supply-chain manager for thin-film giant First Solar, which had acquired the RayTracker startup that Goodwin helped lead.

In 2013, his 10-person crew deployed trackers for a 230 MW solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert. For Goodwin, it was a heady experience to see all the team’s “blood, sweat and tears” take shape on 2,100 acres of desert.

“I was awestruck,” said Goodwin, especially as the utility-scale site felt like a community unto itself. “It was really cool.”

After First Solar withdrew from the tracker segment nearly five years later after he joined the company via acquisition, Goodwin found his way to OMCO Solar.

His next big career shift came in 2017, when OMCO Solar pulled out of contract manufacturing to produce under its own name. The shift was arduous, Goodwin said, and it took much of two years to finish. (Since 2024, OMCO also has made back rails for First Solar.)

“We finally have taken off,” he said. “Now we just need to keep growing.”

In OMCO Solar’s main market proposition, the company emphasizes domestic, one-stop-shop, vertically integrated, quick-turn manufacturing, Goodwin said.

“I just think on project sites that can make things a little easier,” Goodwin said. “These are a lot of little things. I think they add up.”

Inside a roughly 30-mile loop in Alabama, OMCO participates in a three-way production partnership that encompasses OMCO’s plant in Huntsville with First Solar and Nucor Steel Corp. plants in Trinity.

In all, OMCO Holdings operates 700,000 square feet of manufacturing space in, aside from Huntsville, Tallageda, Ala.; Phoenix; Pierceton, Ind.; and Wickliffe, Ohio. OMCO employs about 500 workers, about 200 of whom focus on solar.

With OMCO Solar supply partner and motion-control producer Kinematics’ factory in Phoenix, Goodwin said, the company will deliver mounting systems made entirely from domestically produced products.

“We definitely have a good amount of pipeline to deliver 100% domestic content by the end of the year,” he said.

Given the company’s historical backdrop, it feels quirky to register industry celebrations over the “mad rush for reshoring,” Goodwin said, especially considering OMCO “never have done anything different.”

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