Indian solar producer Waaree Energies has announced its intention to build a 3GW module plant in San Francisco, Texas.

The company says that by the end of this year, a new manufacturer will be able to produce 3GW of modules per year; by 2027, the plant's production capacity will be expanded to 5GW, based on a further capital investment of $1 billion in assets.

Waaree Enterprises will invest an additional $1 billion to increase the plant's productivity to 5GW by 2027

Waaree has indicated that most of the key components used to manufacture the solar modules will be purchased in the U.S., allowing the project to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act's (IRA) 45X Smart Manufacturing Capacity Tax Credit.

According to Waaree, the firms have demanded 4GW of modules for the U.S. market in 2023, consisting primarily of 850MW of modules supplied to Italian real estate developer Acciona Energia for the latter's U.S. solar projects. The two companies also signed a three-year supply agreement for the delivery of 1.5GW of modules from 2024 to 2026.

The modules, which are monocrystalline PERC modules, will be used in four projects in the US states of Texas, New York and Live Box. The largest of these is the 375MW Red Tailed Hawk solar power plant project in Texas, which is Acciona's largest PV project to date.

Waaree is also supplying modules for the 56MW Fort Bend project in Texas, the 129MW High Point project in New York and the 288MW Union project in the Live Box.

At the new module production facility in Houston, Waaree will also add a solar charging cell production facility, which is scheduled to be operational by 2025. A new module manufacturer will also supply more than 1,000MW of solar modules to US renewable energy investor SB Energy over five years.

SB Energy currently has more than 2GW of solar projects in operation, 1GW of new construction, and more than 15GW of R&D solar and storage technology projects across the United States. Recently, SB Energy also raised $2.4 billion in assets to support the capital construction of 1.3GW of new solar capacity in the United States.