Highlights :
- For the Korean chemicals firm, the latest US investment will make it a significant player in the US Solar cell market
Korean chemical industries company OCI Holdings will build a 2GW solar cell production facility in Texas. The Korean firm had closed 2024 with revenues of almost $2.5 billion. With a strong presence in photovoltaic polysilicon manufacturing including plants in Malaysia, the firm is hopeful that its own polysilicon supply chain will provide it a competitive advantage in the US market. It has set an initial target of starting commercial production of 1GW nameplate capacity by the first half of 2026, with a gradual increase to reach 2GW during the second half of 2026.
With a planned investment of $265 million in the facility, OCI Holdings which became the first Korean company to enter the U.S. solar module manufacturing business in 2014 will add to its US presence significantly. The company will use its US subsidiary, Mission Solar Energy for the planned investment.
According to OCI, the US solar cell manufacturing project will enable it to establish a clean solar supply chain using non-Chinese polysilicon from another of its subsidiaries, OCI TerraSus (formerly known as OCIM).
The company did not state where the ingots and wafers would be produced.
OCI’s latest solar cell capacity plans for the US will provide a fillip to domestic sourcing of cells in the US, which has a solar ecosystem that is distinctly favouring modules, where local capacity is slated to cross 50 GW nameplate capacity by 2026 or earlier. The module rush was a consequence of the faster set up of such factories, and to take benefits of the tax credits under the IRA, which seem safe for now, despite some apprehensions that the Trump administration would target those as well.
With OCI’s Mission Energy slated to reach only 1 GW in Module capacity, the excess solar cell production capacity would be diverted to the rest of the US market for domestic module supplies.
Trade body SEIA in the US came out with a report on US solar manufacturing that flagged the jump in module manufacturing without appreciable progress on the rest of the supply chain. The SEIA says that U.S. solar manufacturing announced investments now total $36.4 billion since federal manufacturing policies were enacted in 2022. $6.2 billion of these manufacturing investment announcements are operational, $15.8 billion are under active construction, and another $3.4 billion manufacturing investments are under development.
