Canary Media
U.S. solar manufacturers start 2026 in an odd position. They have made real strides toward reshoring production, but still have a long way to go — and federal and trade policies are layering new uncertainties onto the task.
The U.S. is now actively producing all the major components in the solar supply chain: polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules. That hasn’t happened in over a decade, since SolarWorld closed its wafer-production plant in Oregon in 2013.
“Except for the glass, everything we have in the module could be domestic, should the client choose that,” said Martin Pochtaruk, CEO of Heliene Solar, which manufactures in Minnesota. “The main issue is the limitation on capacity.”
The U.S. can make almost 65 gigawatts of panels annually, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. But it can’t yet build enough of the precursor components to meet the demand for panels. (SEIA expects the U.S. will install 44 gigawatts of direct-current solar capacity this year.)
Major factory construction now underway takes aim at that shortfall, even as factory owners grapple with upheavals in federal domestic and trade policies.
Congress created new rules last year that block tax credits from going to “foreign entities of concern,” or FEOC. Those regulations technically kicked in on Jan. 1, but the Treasury Department still needs to release preliminary guidance and launch formal rulemaking.
Separately, an anti-dumping investigation could raise tariffs on solar imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos, as part of a long-running Commerce Department effort to block imports by China-linked companies that build in other countries to avoid steep tariffs.
And last year, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick launched an investigation into the national security implications of the polysilicon supply chain, which could impose global tariffs on products that contain polysilicon — including solar panels and their components.
Here are the three biggest storylines to follow for the state of domestic solar manufacturing in 2026.
As of last year, U.S. factories have officially been able to make enough solar modules to meet domestic demand.
Cell capacity, however, lags far behind, at just 3.2 gigawatts. This year, companies are pushing to catch up.
“If we want to have the manufacturing here, we have to have the cell manufacturing here, because that’s the most difficult step, in many ways; it’s where a lot of the innovation happens,” said Tim Brightbill, a lawyer at Wiley Rein LLP who has brought numerous trade cases on behalf of domestic manufacturers. “We can’t just outsource that to China and hope the rest of the industry will be OK.”
Newcomer T1 Energy started building its cell factory in December in Rockdale, Texas, and should open 2.1 gigawatts of cell production by year’s end.
“This is the year of execution for us,” said Russell Gold, T1’s executive vice president for strategic communications. The 100-acre facility will cost $400 million to build and will generate 1,800 jobs. A planned second phase would add another 3.2 gigawatts.
Qcells, the subsidiary of Korean conglomerate Hanwha, is still plugging away on its ingot, wafer, and cell factory in Cartersville, Georgia. The site started producing modules in 2024; it was supposed to produce ingots, wafers, and cells — the more complicated precursor steps — in 2025, but that build-out fell behind schedule. Qcells is aiming to get Cartersville fully operational by the end of 2026, said Marta Stoepker, head of corporate communications at Qcells North America.
Norway’s NorSun had planned a $620 million, 5-gigawatt ingot and wafer factory near Tulsa, Oklahoma, set to open in mid-2026 and supply Heliene and others. But the company’s website returns a 404 error code, and NorSun told Heliene that the Tulsa factory is not moving ahead, Pochtaruk said.
Heliene had wanted to build a cell factory to supply its 1.3-gigawatt module production in Minnesota, but it froze development amid the market turbulence when President Donald Trump took office in 2025. In the coming weeks, Pochtaruk said, Heliene will begin large-scale production of panels using Suniva cells made with domestic wafers, supplied by Corning, which are sliced from domestic polysilicon created by Hemlock Semiconductor in Michigan.
Then there’s an important outlier: First Solar, which has long been the only solar manufacturer with a homegrown supply chain.
First Solar is also unique in that it eschews silicon in favor of thin-film deposition of cadmium and telluride. It’s able to produce a fully functioning solar panel without the separate steps of carving wafers or etching silicon cells. That advantage allowed the company to grow and thrive behind protective U.S. tariffs in the years when the silicon-solar industry collapsed.
First Solar has built 14 gigawatts of domestic manufacturing capacity across Alabama, Louisiana, and Ohio and is building a new site in South Carolina.
The Republican budget law passed last year forces companies that want to claim the solar manufacturing tax credit, or tax credits for installing solar panels, to prove that they aren’t overly beholden to control or support from prohibited Chinese entities.
Weaning any high-tech supply chain from Chinese influence is challenging, but the task is further complicated because the federal government hasn’t finalized its rules yet. In theory, any panel coming off the line since New Year’s Day needs to comply, but doing so requires a bit of extrapolation, or perhaps luck.
Some companies should have no problems. Heliene is headquartered in Canada. Qcells hails from Korea. First Solar is homegrown. Still, they need to pay for the legalistic accounting to prove they qualify.
Some manufacturers that had ties to China, however, have taken steps to reverse that status. China’s JA Solar sold its Arizona factory to Corning. Trina Solar sold its Dallas factory in 2024 to the company that became T1; in December, T1 released a detailed breakdown of the steps the U.S.-headquartered company took to clear itself of FEOC-related risk.
“We want to show investors, hey, we’re prepared for this, we did our work,” Gold said.
Others have slightly more complicated arrangements, like Canadian Solar, which, despite its name, operates largely out of China; and Illuminate USA in Ohio, a joint venture between U.S. developer Invenergy and Chinese solar giant Longi. These firms have not yet completed the kind of sell-off that Trina did with T1, so it’s harder to see how their 2026 production could qualify for tax credits.
In another category are clearly Chinese-owned factories in the U.S., including JinkoSolar in Florida and Hounen Solar in South Carolina, which seem sure to fail the FEOC test.
The quest for FEOC compliance will be a dominant theme for the industry this year — especially once the rules are actually released.
U.S. solar manufacturing has long depended on trade protections, and two major proceedings could reshape the global playing field this year.
Historically, the U.S. has levied tariffs on China’s solar exports in order to offset government subsidies that helped drastically lower the cost of panels made there. Major Chinese manufacturers responded by building module assembly factories in other countries that did not face such tariffs.
Last year, the U.S. added tariffs on solar modules from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam after concluding a Biden-era trade case.
A subsequent petition by U.S. manufacturers could extend tariffs to India, Indonesia, and Laos. Such requests used to draw an outcry from solar developers, who would face higher prices for their materials. But last year, at the U.S. International Trade Commission’s preliminary hearing for the latest case, nobody testified in opposition, Brightbill said, though some parties later filed opposing statements.
The Commerce Department’s investigations could wrap up over the next few months and lead to preliminary duties, with a final determination coming in the early fall.
A different trade action could take a more global approach than this country-by-country effort.
“It’s not only tax credits you have to look into,” Pochtaruk said of planning new factory investments. “Any and all business plans have to have in consideration what the heck the 232 [outcome] is.”
He’s referring to the ongoing investigation into the national security implications of the polysilicon supply chain, under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Trump previously used this mechanism to push for tariffs on things like steel and aluminum; it’s different from the authority he invoked for the so-called Liberation Day tariffs last year.
“The courts have largely upheld Section 232 actions by the president, because they tend to defer to the president on national security issues,” Brightbill said.
The Section 232 investigation could produce a far-reaching global tariff on products that contain silicon — not just raw polysilicon but also finished solar cells and panels.
Such a global tariff could drive up costs for the domestic module makers that still have to import cells, since the U.S. is not yet self-sufficient in that step. Then again, it would also raise the cost of foreign modules competing with domestic ones.
“It could be a way to address this Whac-A-Mole problem that we’ve been dealing with for some time,” Brightbill said.
By statute, the Commerce Department must send recommendations to the White House by March 28, which then gives the president 90 days (until late June) to formulate a response.
“All of this contributes to a level of uncertainty around your solar supply chain, and makes building a reliable, transparent, domestic solar supply all the more important,” said Gold, of T1. “The fact that we have a supply deal with Hemlock and Corning gives us a lot of comfort.”
Julian Spector is a senior reporter at Canary Media. He reports on batteries, long-duration energy storage, low-carbon hydrogen, and clean energy breakthroughs around the world.
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