‘Workhorse’ PERC technology to drive Suniva’s scaling up of US solar cell production

“Suniva will continue to produce PERC cells,” Card told PV Tech this week, when asked about the cell technology that the new facility will use. “What this announcement validates is that PERC remains a workhorse product, particularly in the US market.”

PERC has been a key component of the company’s return to cell manufacturing, which began with the relaunch of its manufacturing facility in Georgia in 2024.  Card told PV Tech Premium last week that this period was a “highly dynamic regulatory environment for the use of the TOPCon,” which improved the business case for other types of cell technology.

“PERC was tried and true,” he continued, pointing to the plethora of legal disputes that have embroiled the world’s leading TOPCon manufacturers in recent months. “It was a much more clean path, without the potential threat of legal or regulatory hurdles that you might have to overcome.

“What we did not want to do was build a facility and then immediately get enjoined by someone saying ‘you have a patent violation here, you have a patent violation there.’”

‘You can simply create more physical units of solar cells on PERC’

Last week, Card said that there were “three pillars” behind the company’s decision to use PERC, of which one was the legal landscape in the US. The second pertains to technology, as Card argued that “TOPCon is a much more volatile substance to build than PERC,” which again improves the business case for the latter technology.

The third, and perhaps most significant, pillar is the economic reality of producing PERC cells versus other cells, and the state of the current US supply chain, which incentivises production at scale, rather that production of the most efficient technologies.

“The reality is that, assuming PERC looks good and TOPCon looks good, TOPCon has multiple additional manufacturing steps that PERC does not have,” explained Card. “It physically takes several hours to make a single TOPCon cell than a single PERC cell. When you extrapolate those extra hours into volume over a year, or over three years, it becomes really meaningful, the number of physical cells you can create on one platform than another.

“You can simply create more physical units of solar cells on PERC than you can on TOPCon.”

This difference in scale is all the more significant in the US where, as Card put it, there is a “radically inverted and wide pyramid” of production capacity for various parts of the US solar supply chain; put simply, there is much more module deployment and module manufacturing capacity in operation in the US than there is cell manufacturing, so the most effective cell manufacturing process would be one that can produce the largest number of cells to address this imbalance.

Figures from PV Tech Research reflect this misalignment between cell and module manufacturing capacity, as the US currently has 77.3GW of module manufacturing capacity in operation, compared to just 26.5GW of cells; market analysts from the company published a series of guest blogs on PV Tech last week about exactly this disparity in US manufacturing capacity across the supply chain.

“There had been such a headstart in deployment and module manufacturing, and a lack in cell manufacturing, [and] what I think we correctly ascertained out of that was that the challenge in the US, in the intermediate term—meaning one to five or six years—was not power per unit, but it was sheer number of units,” explained Card.

During our conversation last week, Card said that if his company had 5GW of cell manufacturing capacity “I’d be sold out”; perhaps not unrelatedly, this week’s announcement of the financing for the South Carolina facility came with the news that Suniva has secured offtake agreements for the “majority” of the output of the new 4.5GW facility.

US policy drives manufacturing investment

The US policy landscape has been a crucial factor in recent changes in the US solar sector. The Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) drove an 800% increase in US solar manufacturing capacity and even the more recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) “didn’t kill the 45X advanced manufacturing credit,” as Crux’s Hasan Nazar told PV Tech Premium last month.

While Card is less optimistic about the impacts of the policy landscape on deployment, he agrees that opportunities remain for manufacturers in the current environment.

“We needed a policy framework that supported growing US manufacturing. There is much with OBBBA that supports US manufacturing growth in solar,” he said. “You’ve seen a great uptick in announcements of factories since OBBBA—I’m not going to get into a debate if it’s good overall for solar deployment, everyone has views on what that is—but I can tell you that it is good, and Section 232 is good, for US manufacturing growth.”

Card added that policy has become a major talking point, and a driver of decisions, for companies that are looking to invest in US manufacturing at present.

“I heard over the summer at PV ModuleTech that there were a lot of end-use buyers saying their focus had shifted from a technology evaluation to a regulatory evaluation, and that has become the driver: am I qualified to participate in this market?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter what your product does—good, bad or otherwise—if you’re not qualified to participate in the market.”

Card claims US polysilicon production is ‘robust’

The disparity between module and polysilicon production in the US is even greater than the disparity between module and cell production, and is perhaps the greatest challenge to be overcome if the US is to build a robust domestic supply chain. Figures from PV Tech Research show that there is just 15.5GW of PV-allocated polysilicon production in the US, and just 5GW of US domestic wafer manufacturing capacity.

Suniva has already signed a deal with domestic polysilicon provider Corning to source its polysilicon and wafers from domestic producers, and while Card did not comment on the source of polysilicon for the company’s South Carolina facility, he said this week that Corning “continues to be a valued supply chain partner of Suniva’s”.

Indeed, when asked about the US polysilicon landscape more broadly, Card was bullish on the potential for domestic production.

“It’s robust on poly,” he said. “Certainly when you look at the US poly players, there’s more than enough polysilicon created in the US to support the US industry; there’s actually relatively synchronised capacity between polysilicon and deployment. The problem is that converting that polysilicon into wafers, and those wafers into cells and those cells getting deployed into modules.

“The reality is we don’t have the capacity to make wafers, we have very little capacity to make cells and there has to be more if you’re going to have a self-sustaining domestic supply chain.”

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the influence of policy can be seen in Suniva’s own history. The company was founded in 2007 and quickly expanded to cell and module manufacturing, but an influx of Chinese products into the US market in the 2010s proved stiff competition for domestic manufacturers; Card told PV Tech Premium that during this period, between 30 and 35 cell and module manufactures in the US went out of business.

Suniva, too, filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and it was only after significant policy shifts—such as the setting of tariffs on Chinese goods from 2018 following a Section 201 complaint from Suniva, and the passage of the IRA—that created the economic conditions for Suniva to return to manufacturing in 2024.

Policy challenges in the global supply chain

However, the policy situation is not perfect; Card himself admitted that there could “absolutely” be improvements made to the policy landscape in general, and Section 232 in particular.

Even the US’ policy history has rarely been to the benefit of all companies in the sector. In 2018, when Suniva launched the Section 201 petition, a number of US solar companies and influential trade body the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) objected to the petition, claiming that the tariffs would lead to Chinese manufacturers passing on costs to their US buyers, which would ultimately impede deployment.

While Card was optimistic that the current policy landscape would continue to support manufacturers, he said that, as the US has spent decades ‘offshoring’ its manufacturing capacity across a number of industries, bringing that capacity back to US soil, or even just to allied nations, would take time. For Card, onshoring will be an “evolution,” not a “revolution”.

“You can’t blame this on blue administrations or red administrations, but we’ve spent, as a country, 40 years offshoring our manufacturing,” he explained. “It was not an offshoring revolution, it was an offshoring evolution. So it’s reasonable to expect that, directionally, onshoring can’t be a revolution either; it’s an evolution.”

However, he still says that “we should do it.” Card points to initiatives such as ‘friend-shoring’, a process described by Nazar as the sourcing of materials and components from allied countries as a way to reduce reliance on Chinese goods without needing to rapidly build a robust manufacturing sector in the US, which would be particularly difficult to achieve for the upstream components, such as polysilicon and wafers.

“I don’t think that anyone is arguing for a truly exclusionary protectionist environment,” said Card. “They’re arguing for the US to have the ability to take care of its own energy needs. Some percentage of that is going to be home-grown, but it will always work on the global stage and we will work with friends.”

Again, Suniva’s past, which has ranged from bankruptcy to industry leading cell production, is perhaps instructive in this regard.

“When Suniva rebuilt it’s factory, we had to do it through friendshoring because, as a country, we spent so many years offshoring things that there was no industry in the US,” explained Card. “We were heavily reliant on European equipment in our first factory. It’s a perfect example.”

Card will speak at next month’s PV CellTech conference, held in San Francisco from 13-14 October 2026. He will be present on a panel discussion about how supply chain partnerships can drive manfuacutring growth, alongside experts from Roth, Heliene, Solarcycle and Hemlock Semiconductor. For the full agenda and details on booking, click here.