However, as Manoj makes clear, Indosol has different plans for its different products, both in terms of their production capacity and how they plan to sell them.

“The modules are already in production and the ingots, wafers and cells—the remaining part—will be commissioned this month, probably in the third week of the month,” he says.

Crucially, Indosol plans to only sell its wafers in the US, rather than components such as cells and modules, which could sidestep many of the policies that have been put in place to dissuade US buyers from relying on cells and modules made overseas. With US demand for wafers growing, but a lack of capacity to produce wafers domestically, Manoj argues that overseas manufacturers are best-positioned to plug this supply and demand gap.

“For the US market, we’re clearly focused on the wafers,” Manoj tells PV Tech Premium. “That is the place where we see the gap and the opportunity for other countries’ manufactures to support the US cell manufacturers.”

Plugging this ‘gap’ in wafer supply is a core component of Indosol’s plans for the US; when asked about the motivation behind this emphasis on wafers in the US, Manoj says that “it is mostly about the supply gap and the opportunity that we have for wafers in the US.”

This supply gap is well-documented; figures from PV Tech Research show that US wafer production is a “critical capacity bottleneck” , with just 5GW of capacity currently in operation, compared to over 77GW of operational module manufacturing capacity.

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