More than five years after the solar manufacturer Suniva announced it was closing its Gwinnett County factory, solar cells are once again rolling off the facility’s assembly lines, the company says.
Suniva’s factory closed after the company declared bankruptcy in 2017, the casualty of a flood of cheaper, Chinese-made panels which sent solar prices tumbling.
But last year, the company said it planned to reopen and expand its assembly lines, citing the tax breaks offered by President Joe Biden’s signature climate and health law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivizes domestic solar manufacturing. Georgia’s two U.S. senators, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, cast decisive votes to pass the legislation and Ossoff was instrumental in crafting the law’s solar provisions.
The restart of manufacturing at Suniva’s Norcross plant was first reported by Reuters and confirmed Wednesday by company spokesman Christian Hudson.
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Credit: Jenni Girtman
When it announced plans to reopen last year, Suniva CEO Cristiano Amoruso said the IRA provided a “strong foundation for continued solar cell technology development and manufacturing in the United States.”
Suniva has said the first phase of its revamped facility will create 240 full-time jobs and be able to produce 1 gigawatt of solar cells each year, enough to power about 173,000 homes. The second phase will boost the factory’s output to 2.5 GW annually, the company said in a news release last year, but it was not clear when that production ramp up would occur.
Earlier this year, Suniva reached a three-year agreement to supply cells to the solar company Heliene for use in its finished solar panels.
President-elect Donald Trump has bashed the IRA’s climate spending as a “scam,” but even with the GOP in control of the Senate and likely to claim the House of Representatives, too, new legislation to do away with the tax breaks could be a tough sell politically. While no Republicans voted for the IRA, its provisions are popular in deep red pockets of the country, including parts of Georgia where projects spurred by the incentives are set to create thousands of jobs.
The solar giant Qcells — which announced an investment of $2.5 billion last year to grow its existing Dalton factory and build a new, state-of-the-art facility in Cartersville — has also said the IRA contributed to its decision to expand in the Peach State.
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