Long-time renewables investor Sriram Das has been nurturing a dream for the last half-decade to make solar panels in the United States. Finally, after many starts and stops, his company DYCM Power is 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.
“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.”
This has been a long road for Das, who has been involved in power and utility investments for nearly 30 years, first starting at Merrill Lynch before leading his family’s investment and advisory firm Das & Co. The family firm invested in solar projects in the United States and India, and Das became familiar with the 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.”
And so, Das has been diligently trying to start panel manufacturing in the United States. He first linked with India-based Vikram Solar in 2023 and announced a factory in Colorado that didn’t pan out. Next came his new venture DYCM Power and a 2024 announcement for a manufacturing site in the Southeast. That green-build facility never broke ground, but the DYCM effort never lost steam.
“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, citing that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s accelerated subsidy timelines changed everything. “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.”
Noting that policy uncertainty meant capital-raising timelines needed tightened, Das and DYCM Power decided to find an existing building in an active solar market to finally get business going. That’s how DYCM landed on a 150,000-ft2 facility in Livermore that can accommodate 2 GW of annual production capacity.
“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 more commercialized n-type modules for all markets. DYCM’s first major supply agreement was signed with a residential customer for 1.2 GW over multiple years (details have not yet been released). The company is installing manufacturing equipment that will produce both residential and utility-scale panel sizes.
While starting panel assembly is the No. 1 concern, Das said there’s still a desire to manufacture silicon cells in the United States. That would be another step in the direction of having a secure supply chain, which was Das’s dream in the first place.
DYCM earlier this summer signed on as a petitioner for the Dept. of Commerce’s investigation into unfairly priced solar panel products from Ethiopia. Das said it’s important for U.S. panel companies to fight against China’s tariff sidestepping.
“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.”
As long as no other policy upheavals are thrown into the mix, DYCM Power expects to make more manufacturing announcements in the coming months.
