Episode 143 | Stateside Steel | Origami Solar
As we move to cleaner, more sustainable energy, we have to ask —how stable is the supply chain and what is the environmental impact? Can you build a lithium battery or a solar panel entirely in the Western Hemisphere?
Solar panel manufacturing has increased steadily in the United States, where about 20% of the modules installed in America are actually assembled. However, the aluminum frames come almost entirely from China or Southeast Asia.
Oregon-based Origami Solar has developed an innovative and domestically built solar panel frame out of steel. Founded in 2019, Origami uses a patent pending “cold roll forming” technique to make frames that are stronger than aluminum, can include new features, and are lower in height and profile. Industry-proven coatings make these steel frames resistant to rust.
Gregg Patterson joined Origami as their CEO in 2020. He says the frames are not only made in the USA, but they are already cost-competitive with Chinese aluminum and produced with 85% less greenhouse gasses (GHG), dramatically lowering the embodied carbon and thus the environmental impact from production.
How did we get here? Gregg says the Chinese have focused on a few industries in the last 20 years — solar being one of them.
“They have over the last 20 years co-opted and migrated to a virtual monopoly, which is really risky, especially for the U.S.,” says Gregg. Even the Trump-era Chinese solar panel tariffs, which we explored in Episode 34, did little to ease Chinese hegemony. Gregg says those same panels were shipped out of a different Southeast Asian country.
Global supply chains at face value are not necessarily a bad thing, but “The pandemic and Ukraine are changing the dogma of the past,” says Gregg. He believes all clean energy needs to have supply chains closer to where the energy is consumed, or in this case, manufactured. The Origami design and fabrication methods enable steel module frames to be manufactured regionally in markets like the US, Europe, India and others that are moving to reduce their reliance on China for renewable energy needed to support the energy transition.
“Both the producers and consumers of solar energy are realizing that this concentrated supply chain is not the way we can continue to scale solar to support what the world needs going forward,” he says. These frames should be the last piece of the solar puzzle.
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