Biden offers $1.45 billion in financing for Georgia solar plant

The Biden administration is offering Qcells as much as $1.45 billion in conditional financing to construct the biggest US plant producing silicon ingots and wafers, the building blocks of solar panels. 

The conditional loan guarantee from the Energy Department will go to the company’s plant Cartersville, Georgia. The facility will also make cells and as much as 3.3 gigawatts of panels a year, the agency said in a statement Thursday.

The approval comes from the agency’s Loan Programs Office, which is seeking to provide billions in support for clean-energy projects that would be unlikely to obtain financing through traditional means. The program is a key part of President Joe Biden’s plan to strip carbon emissions from the US power grid by 2035. 

Qcells’ parent Hanwha, based in South Korea, is investing more than $2.5 billion to boost US solar production. Qcells has been pulling its operations out of China after the Biden administration imposed tariffs on solar imports from Asia in an effort to boost domestic manufacturing. The company is also one of the beneficiaries of US clean-energy tax credits.

“The US allowed solar manufacturing to move overseas. Today we change that,” Jigar Shah, head of the Loan Programs Office, said in a post Thursday on X.

Qcells already has a solar plant in Georgia. That facility and the one in Cartersville will reach a combined annual production capacity of 8.4 gigawatts by the end of this year.