- South Korean Owned Hanwha Solutions Plans Investment Expansion in the US
Hanwha Solutions Corporation, South Korea’s biggest shareholder of polysilicon, make – REC Silicon ASA, is planning a multi-billion dollar investment in the US solar industry. The acquisition is meant to cover the entire value chain of the target energy sector.
Hanwha Solutions, who own the solar panel manufacturing company – Q Cells, expressed that it had acquired a 4.67% more interest in REC Silicon from Aker Solutions for USD 44 million. According to Hanwha Solutions, the acquisition “is only a prelude” in its plans of rebuilding the US’s entire solar supply chain. It has also expressed intentions of accelerating investments in almost every sub-sector of the US solar production industry.
The investment plans centre around the 1.7GW solar panel production plant, believed to be the largest in the country, owned by Q Cells, based in Georgia, and REC Silicon’s Washington-based Polysilicon plant. The latter remains unused as it was shut down in 2019 due to the impact of Chinese tariffs on US-made polysilicon. Other reasons were market uncertainties and lowered demands for REC Silicon’s solar-grade polysilicon. However, Hanwha’s solution hopes to get the factory functioning by 2023.