Despite writing about solar energy for over five years, I rarely have the opportunity to get up from my office chair, get in my car and drive somewhere to see something with my own eyes. We solar editors attend a few trade shows a year and see the latest PV products displayed in neat booths in sprawling convention centers, flanked by giant banners, branded merchandise and anything else that might entice customers into sales calls.
Yet the reality of how these products are made is far less glamorous and far more impressive than what happens on a trade show stand.
About 30 minutes northwest of downtown Pittsburgh is the Leetsdale Industrial Park in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, a factory site with several factories, including one that produces coupling tubes for Nextracker single-axis solar trackers.
A factory worker stands next to a coupling tube production line at Nextracker’s factory in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania. Nextracker
The Bethlehem Steel Building has been around since the early 20th century and was once a military landing craft used in World War II. When I first visited the factory in 2022, the age of that building was evident. Half of the factory still had a dirt floor, an old overhead crane dangled above, and natural light poured through the holes in the giant back door that overlooked the Ohio River. Unfortunately, I wore dress shoes during the tour.
The molding line for single torsion tubes may have occupied an eighth to a quarter of that space in 2022, accompanied by a few components and raw materials. Even in those early days, there were already plans to expand activities in this busy factory with a lot of empty space.
Nearly two years after reopening, there are now three active torsion tube lines at the plant and a fourth on the way. The remaining space on the now fully paved factory floor is filled with spools of flat steel coils waiting to be processed and stacks of completed torsion tubes on pallets that reach all the way to the back of the building and spill out into the parking lot (so very that I couldn’t find a parking spot at first). The factory employs more than 70 people – more than tripling the number of entry-level workers – who work three shifts and produce 10 truckloads of product per day, which equates to approximately 12,000 couplings per week.
The production lines are largely automated, with the supervision of factory workers who inspect the process and route tubes between certain steps. Flat steel coiled from large spools is fed into a forming machine that forms the metal into a tube; then a saw cuts it to a specified length and slides along a track, carrying the pipe to a bay; From there it is transferred for forging so that the front end connects to the advancing torque tube, and for drilling so that the customer’s solar panels can be properly attached to it. When a steel coil spool is running low, one end is welded to the next spool so that the production process does not stop.
Finally, forklifts move bundles of pipes to the thousands of other pipes, awaiting collection and delivery on flatbed trucks to solar projects somewhere in the region.
The future form of solar energy production
Chris Bartley, director of utilities at Nextracker, said this is not the company’s first domestic expansion, but it is its most substantial. Since 2021, Nextracker has had more than 20 factory openings or expansions across the United States, and the newest factories in Leetsdale allow the company to supply interconnection tubes for 4 GW of single-axis solar projects annually from that factory alone.
“During the pandemic, we have lost the ability to complete projects on time,” he said. “Our leadership decided they couldn’t handle these logistical delays and wanted to produce onshore.”
A crowd gathers for a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the expansion of production at Nextracker and JM Steel’s torsion tube plant in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania. Nextracker
When coupling tubes rolled off the production line in Leetsdale, Nextracker’s delivery area was much larger with longer lead times, but over the past two years that has changed. Nextracker is now seeing enough demand that products from this facility are primarily supplied to solar projects in the Midwest, Northeast and even within the state. The company has dedicated production lines in Arizona, California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas to serve what Bartley called “regional hot spots.”
“Our goal is for every project site across the country to have a delivery time of less than one day from the factory,” Bartley said.
Domestic production offers some flexibility in orders, as the raw materials come from the region. JM Steel, the contract manufacturer that operates the Leetsdale plant, uses only American steel manufactured in electric arc furnaces, a method that uses scrap or recycled metals and has a lower carbon footprint than coke-fueled blast furnaces. If Nextracker needs to add a few tubes to an order, JM can do that relatively easily and with a shorter lead time than with an international supplier.
“Our error recovery response time is also exponentially faster,” said Negley Rodgers, assistant VP of operations at JM.
Factories are opening across the United States that handle almost every part of a solar panel, from wire management to module assembly. Understandably, it’s big news when a new factory opens, but expansions of existing facilities also deserve some attention.
In the beginning, about twenty people worked at the Leetsdale factory. Now there is a largely local workforce of more than 70 people, a fourth production line is underway and there is a frequent supply of torsion tubes made from regionally sourced steel that are supplied to regionally built solar projects. A few years ago, these projects simply didn’t exist, and now here’s a glimpse of the impact solar energy production is having on a rapidly growing market, and how much room there is left to grow.
I just finished a tour at @NEXTracker‘s torsion tube factory in Leetsdale, PA, and it is much, much busier here than when I was last there. I will soon tell a story about the recent expansion of the factory pic.twitter.com/w8lQ1rBvWb
— Billy Ludt (@SolarBillyL) May 13, 2024