Corning, Suniva, Heliene to Produce Fully Made-in-US Modules

Corning, Suniva and Heliene have announced a partnership they say will produce the first fully made-in-America solar modules.

Corning will produce wafers in Michigan, sourcing polysilicon from its subsidiary Hemlock Semiconductor. Suniva will treat the wafers in its Georgia plant to make cells, which Heliene will assemble into modules in Minnesota. The resulting panels will have a record 66% domestic content, offering developers a “significant advantage” to clearing percentage thresholds needed to secure the
10% domestic content bonus to the Inflation Reduction Act’s Investment Tax Credit (ITC).

Corning has not released the timeline or annual capacity for its wafer facility. The company in October announced that it would be expanding Hemlock’s polysilicon production, and developing ingot-and-wafer manufacturing in the state.

That followed shortly after news that ingot and wafer producers would be eligible for a 25% Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit established in 2022’s CHIPS and Science Act, and that Hemlock had locked up roughly $325 million in federal funding to expand its polysilicon production.

South Korea’s Qcells had billed itself as the first firm to develop a soup-to-nuts U.S. supply chain, a claim that crumbled when REC Silicon in December announced it was ceasing production at its Moses Lake polysilicon plant in Washington. Qcells will now supply its forthcoming ingot-wafer-cell-module facility in Georgia with OCI polysilicon made in Malaysia.

After filing for bankruptcy in 2017, Suniva re-asserted itself with the help of the IRA, starting U.S. cell production at its 1 GW Georgia factory again in September. It is now one of just two cell producers operational in the country after ES Foundry fired up production lines in South Carolina in January. Suniva had previously established a supply partnership with Heliene, which produces 800 MW of modules annually and will add 1 GW of additional capacity in 2025.

Reporting by Colt Shaw, cshaw@opisnet.com
Editing by Jordan Godwin, jgodwin@opisnet.com

© 2025 Oil Price Information Service, LLC. All rights reserved.