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REC Silicon is shutting a polysilicon plant in Moses Lake, Washington, that has struggled to achieve customers’ quality requirements. The plant is one of only a few in the US that manufactures the solar panel raw material, making the closure a blow to efforts to create a US solar supply chain.
The Moses Lake plant started producing silicon materials in the 1980s. REC shut the facility in 2019 because tariffs made it uneconomical to sell to customers in China, where nearly all silicon wafers for solar panels are made.
But in 2022, buoyed by the promise of government support, REC announced a plan to restart the plant. REC signed a deal to sell all the plant’s output to Qcells, which is building a complex in Georgia that will make silicon wafers, solar cells, and complete solar panels.
REC makes polysilicon using a fluidized bed reactor rather than the more common Siemens reactor. REC says the process is cheaper, but it struggled to eliminate impurities. In December, REC revealed that Qcells deemed the silicon from Moses Lake to be not pure enough and was canceling the contract. Tariffs still restrict business with China, and REC says the quality issue discourages selling to the handful of customers outside China. Closing the polysilicon plant will take about 3 months, the firm says.
Going forward, REC plans to focus on making silicon gases, such as silane, which are used to manufacture flat-panel displays and battery materials.
REC says it will maintain silicon gas equipment in Moses Lake so that it’s ready to serve battery material companies when they start large-scale production. In September, REC agreed to supply silane to Sila Nanotechnologies, which plans to manufacture silicon anode materials in Moses Lake. Group14 Technologies, a Sila competitor, also plans to make silicon anode materials in Moses Lake, but from silane it will produce itself.
Other US polysilicon producers are optimistic about the future. Hemlock Semiconductor restarted solar-grade polysilicon production in Michigan in 2022, and the firm is in line for $325 million in government funding to increase its capacity.
Wacker Chemie, which makes polysilicon in Tennessee, disclosed in an October earnings call that sales of solar-grade polysilicon had fallen over the past year, but CEO Christian Hartel said he is confident Wacker can supply firms planning to make silicon wafers in the US. “Uncertainty remains in solar, but we are convinced that the US will be successful in its reshoring efforts,” Hartel said.
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