San Diego will be the location of Kyocera Solar’s first PV module manufacturing plant in the United States. The company will site the assembly line in one of its existing facilities in the area, and hopes to begin production at the factory in the first half of the year. The initial targeted nominal capacity for the plant is 30MW, with the crystalline-silicon modules produced there designated for the U.S. market.
Kyocera Solar already has a major moduling facility in nearby Tijuana, Mexico, which saw its production line modernized last year and its capacity expanded to 150MW.
Referring to the sister plant across the border, company president Steve Hill told KPBS-TV that “we have a management team that supports that operation and staff there that we thought we could utilize to get this operation in San Diego up quickly.”
The news comes a day after Kyocera announced that it had just completed a new solar-cell factory in Japan and plans to increase its capacity from its current 400MW level to 1GW in 2013.