HJT overtakes TOPCon in the US solar factory pipeline

Никита ЛуценкоОснователь и CEO, SOLTECH

Announced US cell capacity now favours heterojunction over TOPCon by 12.16 GW to 13 GW of cells and 16.56 GW of modules, driven by patent risk rather than by physics.

Heterojunction has become the technology of choice in the US solar factory pipeline. PV Tech Research data published on 3 September 2026 shows HJT with 12.16 GW of announced cell capacity and 16.56 GW of announced module capacity in the United States, the largest volume of any crystalline silicon technology. New TOPCon module announcements total just 1 GW. The driver is patent risk rather than cell performance.

Announced versus operational US capacity by cell technology

Why a 32-to-1 gap between modules and cells exists at all

The single most revealing number in the dataset is the ratio. The United States has more than 32 GW of operational TOPCon module capacity and roughly 1 GW of operational TOPCon cell capacity. Modules are assembled domestically; the cells inside them are overwhelmingly imported.

That is not an accident of investment timing. Module assembly is comparatively cheap, fast to build and legally uncomplicated. Cell fabrication is capital-intensive, slow, and - for TOPCon specifically - exposed to intellectual property claims that a US-domiciled manufacturer cannot easily ignore. Faced with that, builders of new cell capacity have moved to a technology where the legal position is cleaner.

What HJT actually does differently

Heterojunction puts thin amorphous silicon layers on either side of a crystalline wafer. Two consequences matter in practice. Its temperature coefficient is lower than TOPCon's, so it loses less output per degree of cell heating, and its bifaciality - the share of rear-side irradiance it converts - is typically higher.

Both of those favour hot, high-albedo sites, which is why the technology keeps coming up in Gulf conversations. The counterweight has always been cost: HJT has historically required more silver paste and more expensive deposition equipment per watt than TOPCon. That is a manufacturing economics problem, and it is the reason the world's fleet is TOPCon today. Our comparison of TOPCon against PERC covers the same trade-off one technology generation earlier.

Позиция SOLTECH

Our position: this is a legal story wearing a technology story's clothes, and treating it as a verdict on cell physics would be a mistake. Nothing in the PV Tech data says HJT is better. It says HJT is safer to build in one jurisdiction.

• Владельцу виллы в ОАЭ: no practical effect, now or soon. You will be quoted TOPCon modules from Asian production, and US-built capacity is aimed at the US market behind Section 232 tariffs that make export uneconomic. If an installer offers you HJT at a premium and cites this trend as justification, that is a sales argument rather than an engineering one - the comparison that matters for a систему для виллы is warranty terms, real degradation and price per installed kilowatt.
• For a commercial or industrial buyer: the HJT temperature coefficient argument is real in Gulf conditions and worth pricing, but it is worth pricing against an actual yield model for your roof, not accepted as a general truth. On a hot rooftop with a light-coloured membrane the gain can justify a modest premium; on a shaded or space-constrained C&I roof it usually cannot. Ask for the PVsyst run, not the brochure.
• For an EPC or investor: the number to watch is not the announcement total but the conversion rate. PV Tech's own framing separates announced from operational capacity precisely because the gap is large, and announced gigawatts have historically been a poor predictor of shipped modules. If a meaningful share of that 12.16 GW of HJT cell capacity does come online, the second-order effect reaches the Gulf as changed global supply flows and equipment lead times - the same mechanism we described in our note on Section 232 and module price floors.

Where we would push back on the coverage: framing this as an HJT breakthrough overstates it. A patent dispute in one country has redirected capital in that country, and China - which builds most of the world's cells - is reportedly moving the other way. Two things are also absent from the published data and would change the reading if they appeared: nothing here indicates HJT manufacturing cost per watt has closed the gap with TOPCon, and nothing indicates how much of the announced pipeline has financing rather than a press release. Until those are visible, we would treat the shift as a real signal about US industrial policy and a weak one about which cell ends up on Gulf roofs.

Источники: PV Tech - PV Chart of the Week: All eyes on HJT in announced US cell and module manufacturing capacity, 3 September 2026, PV Tech Research - The cell technology race shaping the US PV manufacturing boom, 3 September 2026, pv magazine - Heterojunction's long road to the US solar factory, 7 September 2026.