Boviet Solar has officially announced its plans to start a solar panel manufacturing facility in Greenville, North Carolina. The move has been referenced as “Project Gen” in county records for a number of months.
Boviet Solar will use incentives and grants from Pitt County and the North Carolina Dept. of Commerce for the $294 million refab of an existing 500,000-ft2 building in Indigreen Corporate Park. The company intends to build a second 500,000-ft2 building on-site to manufacture solar cells. Both the panel factory and cell factory will have 2 GW of annual capacity.
The site should support 900 jobs, and Boviet expects mass production to begin early 2025.
“Our dreams of producing our PV modules in the U.S. finally come to realization. We are proud of bringing our manufacturing excellence to our most important solar market, creating jobs, and making a positive impact on North Carolina’s economy. We are committed to expanding solar as a widely used renewable energy source in the U.S. and delivering locally made, top-performing PV modules to accelerate the advent of the global renewable revolution,” said Jimmy Xie, General Manager of Boviet Solar.
Ningbo Boway Alloy Materials Co., a Chinese materials manufacturer that supports Boviet Solar, revealed this week its intentions to build a 3-GW TOPCon cell plant in Vietnam in addition to this 2-GW module assembly factory in North Carolina. Although now with Chinese backing, Boviet Solar was founded in Vietnam 11 years ago. The company’s solar panels were one of the few brands explicitly excluded from antidumping/countervailing duties on Southeast Asian imports last year.