Sacramento-based renewables company SPI Energy Co. Ltd. has begun construction of a new solar panel manufacturing plant in Sumter, South Carolina, which will begin delivering modules to customers early next year.
SPI CEO Denton Peng said during a conference call with investors and analysts Tuesday that another new manufacturing line in Sacramento will be up and running by the first half of 2024.
SPI Energy (Nasdaq: SPI) is close to attaining “near-term net profitability,” Peng also said.
The company had a second-quarter loss attributable to shareholders of $2.5 million, compared with a loss of $2.3 million on the same basis a year earlier, it said in a news release Monday. Second-quarter revenue rose 21% to $58.9 million.
“It is important to note that our net loss includes a $3.18 million operating loss from our subsidiary Phoenix Motor Inc., which we spun out into a separate entity on the Nasdaq in 2022,” Peng said in the news release. “Excluding this, SPI Energy's operations have passed the breakeven point, underscoring the strength of our core business lines."
In Sacramento, SPI's McClellan factory currently produces about 700 megawatts of annual capacity of solar panels. The new line that Peng said would open next year in Sacramento will add an additional 550 megawatts annual capacity. The panels SPI builds in Sacramento are 410 watts and 550 watts each, and they are marketed under the brand Solar4America.
When the new manufacturing line opens in Sacramento next year, it will bring SPI's Sacramento plant over 1.2 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity, and that will be the largest domestic solar panel manufacturing operation, said Hoong Khoeng "HK" Cheong, SPI's chief operating officer.
Over the past four years, SPI has managed to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing market, Cheong said. Four years ago, the company was in the business of installing residential solar and working on large-scale commercial solar photovoltaic systems for large customers and utilities.
SPI, the Sacramento region's second-largest publicly traded company, has largely gotten out of the residential business while successfully adding domestic manufacturing of solar photovoltaic panels.
During the second quarter, the company began construction on $66 million in new manufacturing lines in Sumter, South Carolina. A new solar panel manufacturing location in Sumter will have 500 megawatts annual manufacturing capacity. It will also have manufacturing for silicon wafers, which are the crystalline silicon substrate and semiconductor on which photovoltaic cells operate. SPI will use those silicon wafers in Sumter and Sacramento.
Starting this year, the photovoltaic module panels SPI produces in the U.S. have been eligible for a 7-cent-per-watt tax credit under the Inflation Reduction Act. The company anticipates getting money for that tax credit in the future, but so far SPI isn’t sure how to account for the credit, Peng said.
The federal guidance on the credit is not yet clear, he said, adding that the company isn’t sure if it will be additional revenue or additional income.
“We will get money in the future,” he said.
The company is also the majority share owner of Anaheim-based Phoenix Motor Inc. (Nasdaq: PEV), which also has a pickup truck subsidiary in Livermore called EdisonFuture. A year ago, Phoenix bought the fuel cell manufacturing assets of Altergy Systems in Folsom. Altergy started in 2001 to make hydrogen fuel cell generators as backup power for the telecom industry. Phoenix said it wanted the Folsom manufacturing line to design and produce hydrogen fuel cells for use in forklifts, buses, vans and trucks.
SPI's Orange Power unit develops commercial and utility-scale solar arrays.
