Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Program Office (LPO) announced a conditional commitment to provide Qcells with up to $1.45 billion in loan guarantees to support its North American solar manufacturing business expansion.
Qcells is preparing to develop integrated manufacturing of solar ingots, wafers, cells and solar panels in Cartersville, Georgia, providing customers with an integrated solar supply chain from polysilicon raw materials to end-user components. By then, Qcells will become the largest silicon ingot and wafer factory in the United States, solving the upstream capacity problem of the supply chain.
Once fully operational, the factory is expected to have an annual production capacity of 3.3GW of photovoltaic panels, which can power approximately 500,000 homes, equivalent to reducing carbon emissions by more than 5 million tons per year.
The project is expected to provide 1,200 construction jobs and 1,950 full-time jobs upon completion. Approximately 40% to 50% of the construction work has been awarded to local contractors including those from Atlanta, Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee. The investment will create nearly 6,800 jobs in Bartow and Whitfield counties and more than $2 billion in potential sales, according to an economic assessment by the Cartersville-Bartow County Economic Development Department.
The photovoltaic panels produced on site can be used in distributed and centralized power plants. Qcells is also one of the largest developers of utility-scale centralized photovoltaic and energy storage projects in the United States, with more than 2GW of projects under development or construction and a project development pipeline of more than 10GW. The company has signed an eight-year, 12GW solar and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) agreement with Microsoft, which will use solar panels manufactured in Cartersville.
The parts produced by the project are expected to qualify for the advanced manufacturing production tax credit under Chapter 45X. Qcells products produced at the site are also expected to contribute to the project's 10% domestic content tax credit incentive.
The U.S. Department of Energy said that more than 325GW of manufacturing capacity has been announced across the solar supply chain, representing more than 31,000 potential jobs and nearly $16 billion in announced investments, including 111 new or expanded power plants.
This conditional commitment indicates the DOE's intention to fund the project, but the government and the company must meet specific technical, legal, environmental and financial conditions before the DOE finalizes the financing documents and issues the loan.
Source：https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/OsbGIBJBRSqflvRkJc37sQ
