By Patrick Regan, president, Crossroads Solar
The climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act open up a window on what could be. Inside that window is a model for rethinking and revolutionizing the way we manufacture solar modules in America.
Crossroads Solar has demonstrated that you can build a solar module production facility from the ground up, in the U.S., in the 2020s and with a labor force comprised of men and women who traditionally struggle to find good employment. All of Crossroads’ employees are felons reintegrating into society.
Crossroads is a manufacturing facility producing fully certified (UL/IEC 61730 & 61215 and CEC) solar modules in the range of 10 to 12 MWh per year. Our panels are sold regionally to the install community and nationally through Krannich Solar, and are used on houses, farms and commercial buildings throughout the upper Midwest. We have, so far, sold every module that we have produced and have a backorder of sales.
The uniqueness of Crossroads is not only that we are a U.S.- made module manufacturer that started from the ground up in 2021, or that we have a workforce comprised only of second-chance citizens, but rather in the potential for our model of production to revolutionize the solar industry in this country.
The contemporary model is comprised almost exclusively of gigawatt-sized production facilities that are highly automated, mostly foreign-owned subsidiaries of billion-dollar companies that employ a labor force that is highly skilled, highly educated and mostly executive-level. But Crossroads demonstrates that it need not be that way; that we do not have to organize solar manufacturing around the highly automated, highly corporate structure.
It would take 25 Crossroads-sized facilities scaled to 40 MWh in annual production each to equal the output of one gigawatt-sized factory. At first blush, and maybe to the local MBA graduate, this would seem inefficient. But imagine a 40-MWh facility sited on tribal lands and employing people from the community that have traditionally struggled to find meaningful and well-paid jobs, or in a former coal mining community where the jobs have been displaced by the need to wean ourselves from a reliance on coal. A facility like Crossroads that is scaled to produce in the 40-MWh range would provide jobs and skills for those on the labor side of our economic engine. Instead of a front office fleshed out with engineers and accountants, presidents and vice presidents, we could have 25 men and women working on the floor producing panels, with relatively few in the executive suite. This is what the Crossroads model has demonstrated as an alternative pathway to successful solar panel manufacturing.
So imagine those 25 smaller scale production facilities dispersed across Native lands, former coal mining communities, and inner cities, each producing panels for an expanding solar industry. Crossroads Solar has brought on board men and women who have …….