How this Georgia factory is surviving America's solar policy whiplash

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE.

Inside the vast QCells factory in Cartersville, Georgia, workers and a bevy of robots move ultra-thin slices of polysilicon through a lengthy series of machines and chemical baths to get what are known as wafers.

“The $2.5 billion, the 3.5 million gallons of water, the 90 megawatts of power, the 60 tons of chemicals on site, and all of the football fields worth of infrastructure you've seen is to arrive at this,” said Scott Bell, vice president of external affairs at QCells, holding up one of the paper-thin blue wafers.

It’s the basic building block of a solar panel.

In June, the plant, about an hour northwest of Atlanta, expanded from assembling the major components of solar panels to bringing the whole production process under one roof.

It’s a major milestone for the U.S. solar industry. China has dominated solar panel manufacturing since the 2010s, flooding the global market with far cheaper panels than anyone else could make. For a host of reasons — national security, labor practices, job creation — the U.S. is trying to bring back domestic production.

In the latest move, the Trump administration plans to levy new tariffs and impose minimum import prices on polysilicon, the key ingredient for solar wafers. The new measures go into effect in December.

“Having the full supply chain is critical,” said Ben Damiani, chief technology officer at Atlanta-based solar developer Cherry Street Energy.

Moving that supply chain to the U.S., Damiani said, hasn’t been a smooth road.

“Probably the biggest hindrance has been the constant change of our own policies,” he said.

The Biden administration took a carrot approach to attracting solar panel makers: the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included tax credit bonuses for solar projects that used U.S.-made panels. QCells, a South Korean firm, has said those incentives were a major reason they built their Cartersville plant.

The Trump administration, by contrast, is taking a stick approach. While last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act revoked most of the tax credits, it also made solar equipment from certain countries, including China, ineligible for the few tax credits that remain. That, along with the new tariffs, may help a U.S. manufacturer like QCells compete with Chinese imports, which are now more expensive.

The two policy approaches have the same ultimate goal, according to Coco Zhang, a researcher at the banking and investment firm ING. But it has been whiplash for companies.

Following Trump’s latest executive actions, QCells is still likely able to find a way to be successful, Zhang said. But QCells has already made a multibillion-dollar investment in its brand-new facility that took more than three years to come online.

For other companies with less capital and poorer timing, the supply-side incentives for domestic production may not be enough, especially when the policies could completely change again.

As a part of Trump’s tax law, his administration closed the IRS loophole that had left room for China-based solar companies to simply set up shop in the U.S., which, according to Zhang, may go further still toward rooting out Chinese competition.

In the long run, she’s optimistic that the U.S. solar panel industry can complete its shift to domestic production. But because the rules discouraging foreign ownership cut deeper into the supply chain, those restrictions and the policy back-and-forth could make things harder to navigate in the short term, she said.

The short-term outlook is complicated for those buying solar panels, too. The phaseout of federal clean energy tax credits removed a major incentive to develop new solar projects, and the Trump administration has taken steps to cancel federal funding for clean energy projects and add new hurdles for solar and wind installations on federal land. The courts have blocked or reversed some of those actions, but the delays add costs and uncertainties, even for projects that do ultimately move forward.

In the first quarter of this year, clean energy advocacy group E2 tracked nearly $13 billion in abandoned investments in solar, wind, and battery projects. But some $18 billion in new projects were announced as companies scrambled to meet the deadline of the expiring tax credits.

While the new tariffs and price controls on polysilicon could help U.S. manufacturers compete to supply the solar developments that remain, they could also drive up costs for developers.

“[And] limited U.S. supply means many will still depend on imports and face higher costs,” Zhang said.

But industry experts maintain that solar isn’t going anywhere. It’s still one of the cheapest sources of electricity at a time when energy demand is growing fast. Solar panels are readily available, while gas turbines are backordered for years. Solar and storage made up 90% of new power added to the U.S. grid in the first quarter of the year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“We absolutely should make solar, right?” Damiani said. “It is the fastest deployed, lowest cost foreseeable. Solar will be, for the next hundred years, a good portion of our energy.”

The questions, experts agreed, aren’t whether solar development will keep happening, but how quickly, how much it will cost, who will make the solar panels, and where.