The chief executive of fledgling US module and cell producer T1 Energy has highlighted his company’s efforts to forge local component manufacturing partnerships and tap homegrown engineering talent.
In an interview with PV Tech at a recent Roth Capital Partners event, CEO Daniel Barcelo revealed how T1 is leveraging its position as a major PV producer to catalyse local component production, offering supply contracts that could help adjacent manufacturers finance new production lines.
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T1 has recently begun module production at a 5GW facility in Texas and is working toward starting TOPCon cell production later this year at its Austin plant.
He said T1 was actively working with businesses in adjacent sectors to explore possible partnerships in local production of vital components for its modules.
“We’ve been very active last year throughout the chain from encapsulants to diodes, junction boxes, the whole aspect,” Barcelo explained.
“We’re talking to players that currently supply us, finding companies that are near adjacent to it, saying, ‘Hey, you could also make this,'” he said. “If you made this, we could offer a contract, and that contract then could help you finance that.”
Barcelo also revealed that T1’s choice of Austin as its base was influenced by the city’s skilled talent pool, linked to its long-standing status as a hub for semiconductor businesses.
“We’re based in Austin, there’s an ecosystem between Tesla and SpaceX of those types of jobs and those types of work,” Barcelo said. “We made a conscious decision to go there for that reason, and it has a legacy of semiconductor manufacturing, has a legacy of computer manufacturing, from the days of Dell to the days with Reagan, with space programmes.”
The full version of our interview with Daniel Barcelo is available to our Premium subscribers here.
‘Scaling every link in the US PV manufacturing value chain’ is the theme of our annual PV CellTech conference in San Francisco on 13-14 October 2026. For the full agenda and details on booking, click here.
