U.S. polysilicon manufacturer eyes mid-October for first Qcells shipment (original) (raw)

(REC Silicon's Moses Lake, Washington facility. Courtesy: REC Silicon)

REC Silicon, one of a select few polysilicon manufacturers in the United States, has announced its recently restarted Moses Lake, Washington facility is now ramping up production in anticipation of commercial shipments. The company expects to make its first commercial shipment by mid-October, pending a final qualification test.

Hanwha QCells, which helped restart the facility after becoming REC Silicon’s largest shareholder in 2022, will use the low-carbon polysilicon produced at Moses Lake for ingot and wafer manufacturing at the new Qcells manufacturing facility in Cartersville, Georgia. The Cartersville facility, expected online next year, will make Qcells the only company with a fully integrated domestic solar supply chain.

Production at Moses Lake has been pushed back several times now, most recently delayed by a series of modifications and mitigations in REC Silicon’s silane-based manufacturing process. The changes were aimed at addressing a previously announced issue: higher-than-expected levels of an impurity in the product.

“All impurities have now been reduced to levels that are acceptable to our customer,” reads part of a statement released by REC Silicon. “And we have an agreement in principle to modify a specification subject to a final evaluation and qualification test, as is typical in the industry after such a modification.”

Construction activities related to the restart of the Moses Lake facility are now complete, per the company, including Silane IV, and equipment will be started as needed as capacity ramps up.

“Getting to this point and mitigating the previous impurity issue was the result of hard work by many dedicated personnel,” explained CEO Kurt Levens. “We will soon be beginning a new phase for the facility where efforts are transitioning to continuous quality improvement to exceed the market standard, ramp-up, and optimization. There is still a large amount of work to be accomplished. We will strive to reach our full commercial production capacity as soon as we can while maintaining our focus on product quality. We appreciate the interactions with our customer in getting to this stage, our discussions have always centered around our aligned interests of our polysilicon enabling their efforts to create a complete PV solar value chain in the USA. This is demonstrably a positive outcome for both parties.”

In addition to adding domestic polysilicon to the U.S. supply chain, REC Silicon also expects to supply silane gas in significant volumes for anode materials to a fast-growing battery industry.