TandemPV has announced the opening of its commercial demonstration factory in Fremont, California. The facility marks a step toward commercializing U.S.-manufactured next-generation solar panels for utility-scale projects.
As electricity demand rises, driven in part by data centers and AI workloads, utilities are moving quickly to add new capacity. Tandem PV’s Fremont factory supports efforts to reshore advanced solar manufacturing and reduce reliance on overseas supply chains. The line is designed to demonstrate that perovskite-silicon tandem panels can be manufactured reliably in the United States at scale with high power density, durability, and lower costs.
The 65,000-square-foot Fremont site is producing tandem solar panels using state-of-the-art equipment. The line has approximately 40 MW of annual nameplate capacity, and the panels are roughly 60 times larger than Tandem PV’s R&D-scale devices. The factory is intended to validate large-format production and accelerate market adoption.
“This factory marks the shift from impressive R&D results to repeatable manufacturing at a commercially meaningful scale,” said Tandem PV CEO Scott Wharton. “People have talked for years about the promise of perovskites. This is what it looks like to deliver. It is an important milestone in restoring American leadership in solar manufacturing through the kind of breakthrough engineering Silicon Valley is known for.”
Tandem PV’s proprietary technology combines a thin perovskite light-absorbing layer with a conventional silicon solar cell. By capturing more of the solar spectrum than silicon alone, tandem panels generate more electricity from the same footprint. The higher efficiency lowers overall costs, especially because labor, land, and balance of system costs account for roughly 75% of utility-scale solar deployment costs.
The Fremont opening builds on recent R&D progress that Tandem PV is now translating into production panels, including 29.7% efficiency based on internal testing. In accelerated lifetime testing, the latest-generation panels show less than 1% average annual power loss, about a tenfold improvement versus the company’s results from a year ago. Tandem PV is targeting 25+ year performance consistent with industry standards and warranty requirements for utility-scale solar projects.
“Utility-scale perovskites are here,” said Jennifer Granholm, former U.S. energy secretary. “Tandem PV is delivering an ingenious product that can help provide more clean power with a smaller footprint and meaningful cost savings as we scale deployment in the United States.”
With the Fremont site now operating, Tandem PV has begun producing initial modules, with shipments planned to support customer validation trials later this year. The company plans to sell its first commercial panels in 2026 from this facility and is targeting high-volume manufacturing in 2028.
