Long-time renewables investor Sriram Das has spent the past five years pursuing a goal of manufacturing solar panels in the United States. After several false starts, his company DYCM is now closer than ever to producing American solar panels with policy-compliant supply chains. DYCM expects to begin production on a module assembly line in Livermore, California, before the end of 2026, a timetable that reflects how quickly solar manufacturers are now having to move to secure financing, equipment and sites.

“The factory will be ready by the end of the year,” Das said. “We’re posting a bunch of jobs today, and that is ongoing. We’re hiring more every week.”

Das has spent nearly 30 years in power and utility investments, beginning at Merrill Lynch before leading his family’s investment and advisory firm, Das & Co. Through the family firm, he invested in solar projects in the United States and India and gained firsthand experience with a difficult supply chain.

“I had invested in a project right when UFLPA enforcement started. It was like 500 MW with a Chinese module supplier, and the contract was canceled overnight with no recourse,” he said. “They wouldn’t even give the deposit back, and it was a whole legal thing for months. I was like, there’s an opportunity here to present reliable supply chain options.”

That experience pushed Das to keep working on U.S. panel manufacturing. He first connected with India-based Vikram Solar in 2023 and announced a factory in Colorado that never materialized. A later venture, DYCM, included a 2024 announcement for a manufacturing site in the Southeast. That greenfield project also failed to move forward, but the company continued to pursue its plan.

“The first edition of DYCM was going to do a big integrated facility in the Southeast. That was going well, until everything changed last year,” Das said, referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and its accelerated subsidy timelines. “The ITC got shortened. The long-term offtakes that our financing was requiring just became not possible anymore. It became apparent that [a new-build in the Southeast] just wasn’t going to work.”

With policy uncertainty tightening capital-raising timelines, Das and DYCM shifted strategy and looked for an existing building in an active solar market. That search led them to a 150,000-ft2 facility in Livermore that can support 2 GW of annual production capacity, allowing the company to move faster than a ground-up build.

“Why California? It’s really very simple. Here’s where we found buildings that we could go into quickly that had the power and the necessary support structures, and there’s also a ready-made talent base we can pull from,” he said. “We don’t have to spend years setting up recruiting programs or [constructing] a greenfield. That was going to be at least two-and-a-half years of construction. It’s such a long gestation period that doesn’t work now.”

Das told Solar Power World that DYCM plans to assemble domestic HJT cells and also produce commercialized n-type modules for all markets. The company’s first major supply agreement was signed with a residential customer for 1.2 GW over multiple years, though details have not yet been released. DYCM is installing manufacturing equipment that will produce both residential and utility-scale panel sizes.

Although module assembly is the immediate priority, Das said the company still wants to manufacture silicon cells in the United States. He said that would be another step toward the secure supply chain that motivated the effort in the first place, while also building domestic capacity in a part of the solar industry that has been heavily dependent on imported components.

Earlier this summer, DYCM signed on as a petitioner in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s investigation into unfairly priced solar panel products from Ethiopia. Das said U.S. panel companies need to confront China’s tariff circumvention.

“It’s not that [China] has some magic machinery that makes [panels] magically cheaper. It’s that they have magic government money that makes everything cheaper,” Das said. “They just move factories from China to Laos or Vietnam, and then you add AD/CVD against there so they put the whole thing back into containers and send it to Africa. They treat it like a game, so we have to play it.”

If no further policy upheavals intervene, DYCM expects to announce additional manufacturing developments in the coming months.