The White House has praised Lightsource bp for “driving demand for made-in-America solar” via building 2GW of clean energy, representing more than US$2.1 billion of investments across the US.
The mention came as part of a discussion of the Clean Energy Buyers Institute’s ‘Decarbonizing Industrial Supply Chain Energy’ programme. The programme intends to accelerate the market for low-carbon industrial commodities by incentivising large consumers to use carbon-free energy throughout their supply chains.
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The US government has been pushing ‘made-in-America’ solar since the introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in August. The US$369 billion package contained US$40 billion in tax credits for clean energy manufacturing and clean tech manufacturing facilities, with these incentives set to potentially push the US’ solar manufacturing capacity over 50GW by 2030.
The move has been praised across the US solar energy industry, and is expected to lead to significant investment in the sector and set the country on course to meet its decarbonisation targets.
And Lightsource bp is not alone in stimulating demand for US made solar products. In June, a consortium of four US solar companies committed to spending US$6 billion on purchasing 6-7GW of crystalline silicon solar modules every year to encourage the rapid scaling of domestic manufacturing in the US. PV Tech Premium sat down with the heads of two of those companies to discuss the plans, which you can learn more about here.
In the same week as the praise from the White House, Lightsource bp unveiled a 130MW PV project, the Black Bear Solar project, and accompanying 20 year power purchase agreement (PPA) to supply solar power to the Alabama Municipal Electric Authority.
The company has made a flurry of announcements over the past couple of months. At the start of October, development was approved on a large Arkansas PV project, while a week later the company closed financing for a 210MW project in Brazil, where is has also been signing PPAs with local companies to develop projects.
In August, it started construction on its 400MW Wellington North and 90MW Wunghnu solar farms in New South Wales and Victoria, respectively.
