Hanwha Qcells

Who were they combined with? How were they...

Oh, we work with, it's called Enfin and Q-Cells.

Have you heard of, they're out of, they're the largest panel manufacturers in the U.S.

Oh, that's right.

The idea is to bring that part of the solar supply chain here and help solar equipment manufacturers here.

That includes Qcells, a Korea-based company that recently expanded production at its two giant factories in Georgia.

Emily Jones of Grist and WABE reports.

Inside the vast Qcells factory in Cartersville, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, workers and a bevy of robots move ultra-thin slices of blue-gray crystal through machines and chemical baths to turn what are known as wafers into cells.

cells.They're rinsing and etching and rinsing and etching, going just all the way down this line to create, you know, the absolutely perfect surface.

Scott Bell with QCells says the perfect surface is one that's really good at soaking up sunlight.

This is an unfair answer.

QCell is making poly and wafers and cells right now in Georgia, unless I'm wrong.

Somebody correct me.

They've announced that they are.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the the origins of amp your story and and why you started it

yeah definitely i was actually fairly burnt out myself i was about six months into building a business at that point i didn't know if i wanted to continue it and for me i i attended the charge conference for the first time i got to meet friedrich met tom warwick he's at signandri now and he was really welcoming and and A bunch of other marketers, Misty or Front Power, Nick, Sentara from QCells, all these really warm, welcoming individuals who just reminded me like, one, I'm not alone.

Other people care about this thing that I care about and it gives me purpose in life.

So I want to keep doing it.

Fronius is one, BYD is another.

What about QCell? Yeah, no, we haven't tried them.

So they were panels and then they had a battery.

So basically we just found the companies, there was always comms issues.

So yeah, I think the system is bifurcating and, and investors are still trying to get their head around the business model of the technology.

Some of s- for some time, people thought the money was to be made in the manufacturing of, of the technologies, and in Europe we had some big, big listed players, if you remember, Qcells and so on in Europe more... well, more than a decade ago now.

And then the realization that, um, when it comes to manufacturing, you're gonna get beaten by China on terms of scale and cost, just a massive deployment of capital into scaling up.

And then now people are thinking, well, actually, the business model is somewhere else.