US solar manufacturing is moving into a more demanding phase today. The first wave of announcements focused on capacity plans, factory openings and job creation potential. The next phase focuses on how production lines are specified, how factories are built and run, how technologies are selected, and how the sector defines a credible long-term roadmap.
Solar Manufacturing USA 2026 has been designed specifically for the manufacturing side of the industry, bringing together the companies building domestic production, the suppliers enabling factory ramp-up, the experts benchmarking quality and performance, and the technology voices shaping what-comes-next.
This is not a downstream solar event, and it is not a general policy forum. It is a focused meeting point for the people making decisions on factory execution, equipment, materials, process flows, technology ownership and long-term manufacturing strategy in the United States.
Where buyers, manufacturers and suppliers meet
Solar Manufacturing USA 2026 brings the full U.S. solar manufacturing ecosystem into one room, with particular emphasis on the buyers, investors and third-party entities whose participation helps define the commercial relevance of the event. Held in Austin, Texas, the event also gives delegates access to the state where solar manufacturing activity is becoming most concentrated, with opportunities for follow-on meetings and factory visits beyond the two-day programme.
Austin is the gateway to a state where U.S. solar manufacturing is becoming increasingly localized, scaled and visible. For many delegates, the value of attending will extend beyond the conference itself to include follow-on meetings and factory visits in Texas.
Attendees are expected to include CTOs, heads of R&D, manufacturing and operations leaders, procurement teams, commercial and strategy executives, and specialists involved in supply-chain, quality and market-entry decisions.
Organizers: pv magazine · Finlay Colville
When purchasing battery energy storage systems (BESS), price is only the starting point. The procurement process is often riddled with hidden pitfalls that can jeopardize project delivery and expected returns if not carefully managed.
The opening session sets the scene for Solar Fab-Tech USA 2026, combining a market-led overview of the domestic manufacturing base from conference Chair Finlay Colville with a C-level industry perspective on the technologies, strategic investments and execution realities driving U.S. solar production.
This session examines how solar cell manufacturing in the U.S. can be built around differentiation and innovation, focusing on the cell architectures, production equipment and technology roadmaps defining the sector.
This session features leading U.S. solar manufacturers sharing production-line metrics on yield, quality and performance, alongside independent testing, factory audits and due-diligence processes that help validate industry benchmarks.
This session examines the upstream transition unfolding today as U.S. solar manufacturing moves from ambition to execution, with presentations from the companies leading new domestic ingot and wafer production.
Extending the morning focus on cell innovation, this session examines how new U.S. solar cell lines are being specified to enable in-house ownership of technology choice, process-flow customization and Intellectual Property.
This session explores the capital build-out now underway across U.S. solar manufacturing, with a focus on the companies designing, equipping and delivering the factories and production lines behind new domestic capacity.
This session explores the OPEX side of U.S. solar manufacturing, with a focus on materials supply, cost control and the factory-level economics that will determine long-term viability.
Technology selection for the first wave of new U.S. solar production lines is already spanning a broad range of options, including PERC, TOPCon and heterojunction. This session explores how the sector may evolve from today’s mixed manufacturing landscape toward higher-performing cell structures such as back-contact and tandem architectures, including perovskites.
This closing session uses the current U.S. manufacturing base as the springboard for defining a pathway to 100 GW by 2035. Through industry-led presentations and debate, the session asks how the sector gets there, what is still missing, and how today’s technologies, investments and manufacturing footprint can form the basis of a credible long-term roadmap.
Ryan joined pv magazine in 2021, bringing experience from a top residential solar installer and a U.S.-based inverter manufacturer. He holds a Master of Energy and Environmental Management degree at the University of Connecticut and a degree in Management with a certification in Sustainable Business Practices from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Finlay Colville has been actively engaged with the solar industry for more than 20 years and is recognised as a leading analyst in the sector. For 15 years, Finlay managed market research business units at Solarbuzz and PV-Tech. He established Terawatt PV Research in 2025 as the working platform for his activities going forward.
Dr. Romero is a Senior Managing Director of Black & Veatch Management Consulting. He leads the Bankability and Technology Advisory practice. Dr. Romero specializes in the assessment of risks of new technologies and the development of strategies to mitigate the risks. His team performs bankability studies of new technologies and provides technology advisory services tailored to meet clients’ needs in areas of technology validation, design, performance, reliability, manufacturing, and others. Dr. Romero is a renowned photovoltaics specialist.
Dr. Beck is an innovator and strategist with over 3 decades of senior and executive RD&D, project & operations management expertise in the photovoltaic industry. He served as Chief Technologist at First Solar in the United States and Vice President of the PV Development Team at Samsung in Korea, as well as in other leadership positions at 3 PV startups and has advised several global companies in the renewable energy sector on technology and business-related aspects. In his role as the Program Manger for the Manufacturing and Competitiveness sub-program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office Dr. Beck focused on private-public partnerships through strategy and program development supporting industry-lead innovation and new product development and demonstration across the full PV value chain. He recently joined RCT Solutions, a global owner’s and lender’s engineering firm successfully executing over 100GW of projects to date. Dr. Beck will focus on supporting PV manufacturing activities in the North American market.
Dr. Beck holds a PhD in physical chemistry and has been awarded over a dozen scholarships and awards in the field of PV research and manufacturing. He is the primary inventor on 22 patents. As a subject-matter expert of ANSI US-TAG and IEC TC82 WG2, for two decades he has been actively engaged in global PV-standards activities. Dr. Beck has served on numerous DOE PV review boards and chaired the IEEE Santa Clara Valley PV Chapter from 2013–2015. He is a subject-matter expert for the peer-reviewed journals Thin Solid Films and Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, and in 2012 was appointed to the editorial board of the latter.
A veteran of both the US Army and the renewable energy sector with nearly a quarter of a century of experience bringing the solar industry to scale, and making PV plants more capable. As CTO, Nick is responsible the technological and ecological vison of the company, as well as the cultivation of domestic sources of supply. Silicon Ranch owns and operates–projects that Nick designed over a decade ago, including the first transmission interconnected PV plant in the Southeast. Prior to Silicon Ranch he held positions at Applied Materials and Tesla manufacturing both crystalline and thin film cells and modules.
Nick holds 5 patents in both PV module manufacturing and design, and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University. He serves as an industry advisor, and reviewer for the Department of Energy’s PACT and DuraMAT consortiums. As well as the Principal Investigator of a DOE funded program exploring the appropriate co-location of solar projects with regenerative cattle ranching.
Ms. Jester is one of the world’s longest tenured solar engineering and operations executives. Ms. Jester has been focused on solar PV for the last 45+ years. She recently retired after serving as Managing Director of North American operations for Kiwa PI Berlin, a leading risk management and quality assurance service provider for solar power plant equipment. She has held executive management positions at several solar manufacturing companies and other renewable energy industries around the globe-including board positions with numerous companies, particularly with Highland Materials where she serves as Chairman of the Board, and Next Energies Technologies where she serves as an Independent Director.
Tim Crane is Senior Director of Supply Chain at Palmetto, where he leads sourcing, planning, and procurement across the company’s hardware portfolio, with direct accountability for approved vendor and product management and compliance with FEOC, UFLPA, and Domestic Content requirements.
Tim brings two decades of solar procurement leadership to the panel, having built and directed sourcing organizations at Sunrun, Tesla/SolarCity, and Mainstream Energy (parent of REC Solar and AEE Solar). Across these roles he has led global hardware sourcing strategy covering modules, inverters, batteries, and mounting systems — consistently delivering material cost reductions while maintaining the service and quality standards that large residential and commercial portfolios demand.
Throughout his career, Tim has operated at the intersection of two competing imperatives that define serious procurement leadership: the relentless pressure to reduce cost of acquisition, and the equally real obligation to ensure that what gets specified and purchased will perform bankably over a 25-year asset life. His work has consistently required reconciling those demands while navigating supply chain traceability, ethical sourcing, and third-party quality assurance — the same issues now at the center of the U.S. manufacturing conversation.
Xavier Quinet is a procurement executive with over 25 years of experience in industrial and renewable energy sectors. He currently serves as VP of Procurement at Treaty Oak Clean Energy in Austin, Texas and leads strategic sourcing for utility-scale solar and BESS projects. Previously, he held senior roles at BayWa r.e. Americas and ENGIE Solar, overseeing procurement and EPC construction of hundreds of megawatts across North America and internationally.
Charles F. Gay, Ph.D., is a pioneer and global leader in solar technology with more than 50 years in the field. He earned his B.S. in Chemistry (1968) and Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry (1978) from UC Riverside. He has led world-first manufacturing milestones at ARCO Solar, Siemens Solar, ASE Americas, and Applied Materials, and served as Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (2016–2019) and Director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (1994–1997). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2013 and is an inventor on more than 15 issued U.S. patents.
Juan Carlos currently leads the procurement of PV modules and other equipment categories in the U.S. for Lightsource bp. Previously, Juan Carlos held a similar position at RWE and also sold wind turbines at Goldwind. Prior to that, Juan Carlos obtained his Master’s degree in Industrial Technology and Management from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Bacherlor’s of Science in Electromechanical Engineering from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.
Dr. Henry Hieslmair joined DNV in 2017 and has been focused on various module topics including photovoltaic system degradation, PV module useful life assessments, PV module waste volume, toxicity and circularity (Nature Physics 19.10 (2023)), module O&M modeling, utility plant construction automation, and emerging module technologies. Henry Hieslmair has worked in the PV solar industry since 1993 when he began his PV career at Siemens Solar Industries in Camarillo CA (previously ARCO Solar). Subsequently, he pursued his graduate and post-graduate work at U.C. Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories where he focused on process improvements for multi and monocrystalline PV silicon. After his studies, he cofounded a start-up where he designed and developed a thin multicrystalline interdigitated-back-contact PV cell and module. In 2010, as an early employee at another start-up, he helped pioneer the first high productivity (>3000 wafer per hour) ion implantation tools for the PV industry for phosphorous and boron doping (was utilized for early TOPCon manufacturing). Subsequently, at SunEdison, he worked to commercialize their Continuous Czochralski silicon growth method, performed cell-to-module loss analyses, developed module testing procedures, and performed extensive analysis on boron-oxygen light induced degradation. Over the course of his career, Henry has also consulted for many firms involved in silicon PV including DOE Sunshot program, Solexel, Kleiner Perkins, and Crystal Solar. He has 7 patents and has authored or co-authored over 50 conference and journal articles on PV materials science, device operation, and manufacturing.
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