U.S. News

A solar panel maker in Georgia that has booked $230 million in federal tax credits stands to collect hundreds of millions more as it pursues plans to create the first end-to-end solar manufacturing chain in the US, easing reliance on China and related concerns about the use of forced labor.

But at least through the end of this year, the Qcells solar plant, which South Korea’s Hanwha Solutions Corp. opened in Dalton, Georgia, in 2019 and almost doubled in capacity last year, is making panels with base components from China. And previously unreported Chinese filings show that two of Hanwha’s Chinese suppliers have received a portion of the polysilicon they used in such components from companies that appear on a list of sanctioned entities the US government designates as using forced labor. Those subsuppliers’ inputs are barred from entry into the US under federal law.

There’s no evidence that components containing the banned polysilicon have turned up in Qcells panels. Nonetheless, amid an industrywide scramble to comply with US import restrictions, questions persist about how well any solar-panel maker can police its supply chain in China. In the case of Qcells, which is key to the Biden administration’s plans to develop a fully onshore solar industry, the company offers assurances but no public details of its polysilicon sourcing, as some other manufacturers have provided to researchers.