Since late 2024, Turkish company Elin Energy has operated a 1 gigawatt solar module factory in Brookshire, Texas, just west of downtown Houston, in which it produces its Sirius PV brand of solar modules for the U.S. market.
The company now employs 300 workers at the facility, where it makes ultra high-quality, all black modules for some of the biggest companies in U.S. residential solar. Elin has also helped kickstart a vibrant ecosystem of upstream component suppliers, which now produce many of the materials necessary to build solar modules, right in Texas.
Sirius PV products are held to extremely high quality standards, ensuring that every module rolls off the assembly line ready for a lifetime on a rooftop, with a perfectly uniform black surface that will stand the test of time.
“If you’re flying a drone at noon on a cloudy day, you should not be able to see the tiniest bit of difference in color on any module, or between modules,” says company CEO Ercan Kalafat. “All of them need to look exactly the same, and we expect that from the frame, from the back sheet, from the bus bar, from the cell. All our systems are built around this, and orchestrating this harmony on a module is crazy complicated.”
The level of precision in production is not just for show. The company offers a 25-year product guarantee and 30-year linear power output warranty to give customers peace of mind that it stands firmly behind the quality of its products.
To deliver on this promise, Sirius PV engineers have designed a highly automated factory, backed by a bespoke Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and a custom artificial intelligence engine fed data by sensors at every point along the line.
Sirius PV does not use third-party MES providers. All machine code, software, and tracking architecture is developed internally. The facility’s workers perfectly integrate with the automated system, carefully judging each module and providing human verification of what the automated systems see.
The level of operational precision gives the company a number of advantages. The sensors are calibrated to detect the slightest variations from ideal conditions in a number of machines on the line, alerting plant managers whenever machines drift away from the specified ideal.
The MES tracks real-time machine performance down to millisecond increments, recording parameters such as the exact X, Y, and Z axes of soldering machines, the temperature of the soldering tip, and the temperature and pressure of the laminator.
The management team can track machine performance over time, and gather data on the efficiency of workers across the facility’s four shifts, allowing them to reward workers who perform above standards and offer additional training to operators who fall behind.
Plant managers can use the system to pull up data about every module that comes off the line, tracing every single component used in a module, from the moment it arrived in the factory until the moment the module was packed for shipment and delivered to the customer.
If a Sirius PV module ever develops a problem in the field related to one of the materials used in its construction — even after many years — the Sirius PV team can retrieve data on every other module made with materials from the same source, down to its position in the pallet as it was wrapped for shipment.
The company recently had the chance to demonstrate the capabilities of its software when one of its customers noticed a Sirius PV module in its stock with an unfamiliar label on the back.
The label, it turned out, was meant exclusively for B-grade modules that don’t meet the strict appearance requirements of the company’s flagship products, but the module in question was built exactly to spec, exhibiting no defects. The incident prompted the company to investigate how the mislabeled module could have been included in the batch of Sirius PV products.
To find the root cause, the team analyzed the data from all of the sensors on its production line during the making of the module in question, ultimately discovering that a delayed reading from a misaligned sensor created what Kalafat called a “perfect storm” of code errors, ultimately causing the factory’s code to pull a label template from Elin’s European server instead of its American one.
Using the company’s AI software, the engineers performed a simple query to find any similar instances of the perfect storm. Within a couple of minutes, the system had identified 59 times the code errors had triggered the misapplication of the B-grade labels. Not only that, it returned all the relevant data about the modules; exact shipping details, delivery dates, truck license plates, pallet numbers, and more.
Of the 59 affected modules, 31 had been shipped to the customer who initially reported the issue and 28 went to other buyers. Within 24 hours of the first report, the company had proactively contacted all the other buyers — who were previously unaware of the error — to inform them of the situation and work to provide them with replacements.
Prior to implementation of the AI system, it might have taken half a day of work for an engineer to sniff out all 59 times the error occurred. With the AI system, it took just a single natural language query and a couple of minutes of compute time.
Tracking the materials used in the modules in this way offers other advantages as well. Real-time production analytics allow the company to compare raw material suppliers (such as cell vendors) by tracking rates of cracks, dark spots, soldering flaws, and other failure metrics under identical machine conditions.
More importantly, the company proactively shares this data with its material suppliers, identifying ways their companies can work together to improve manufacturing outcomes.
Elin also helps its buyers integrate the material tracking data, giving them an automated way to maintain compliance with tax credit requirements to verify that modules are built using a certain percentage of domestic and non-FEOC content and are not built using components created under not forced labor conditions.
Sirius PV’s in-house plant AI and MES are setting the standard for domestic PV module assembly, allowing the company to deliver its ultra-high quality products to major buyers, while building relationships built on trust and support.
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