Making Solar Panels Is 'Horrible' Business. The US Still Wants It.
“This constant grind of getting better at making a commodity product means that it's very, very hard to make money,” says BloombergNEF’s Jenny Chase on Zero.
US Vice President Kamala Harris tours a Qcells solar panel manufacturing plant in Dalton, Georgia on April 6. In January, QCells announced an investment of $2.5 billion in solar manufacturing in the US.
Photographer: Andi Rice/CNP
In the next three years, 1TW of solar power will be added to the global grid as competition keeps driving down prices. And after years of innovation in China, Japan and Germany, the US is finally getting in the game: Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act includes ample incentives for American-made cleantech. Qcells, part of South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Solutions, announced plans in January to build a US solar supply chain from scratch in order to access significant tax credits.
But solar manufacturing has never been a particularly reliable business. So why is the US leaning into it at all? On this week’s Zero, Akshat Rathi talks to Jenny Chase, a solar analyst with clean energy research group BloombergNEF, about the industry’s boom-bust cycle, what companies like Qcells are up against and why solar's rapid growth could even make daytime electricity free. We also hear from Lindsay Cherry, policy manager at Qcells, about how the company plans to achieve its ambitious goals.