SunPower is shutting down its solar panel factory in Hillsboro, a little over two years after the company bought the former SolarWorld plant.
The San Jose-based company said Thursday afternoon that it expects "to cease operations by March 2021 and complete the wind-down of the facility in early June."
Although SunPower said it was looking into "selling the plant, exploring a joint venture option or assessing potential partnerships," it didn’t sound at all hopeful for the 170 employees there.
"We made the difficult but necessary decision to close our plant after careful evaluation and the change in focus of our business over recent months," Tom Werner, CEO and chairman of the board of SunPower, said in a news release. "We recognize how hard this is for all the employees impacted and are dedicated to helping them through this transition."
The company attributed the decision to its spinoff of Maxeon Solar Technologies, which is focused on international panel production and sales. That left SunPower using Maxeon as a supplier for panels while concentrating on "innovative solar and battery storage systems sales," the company said.
SunPower paid $26 million for the Hillsboro plant in late 2018, in the wake of the collapse of SolarWorld’s German corporate parent and the Trump administration’s imposition of tariffs on most global solar imports into the U.S.
After announcing its plan to buy the plant, SunPower won a tariff exclusion from the Trump administration on certain types of high-efficiency solar cells and modules that it produces overseas. SunPower said at the time the exclusion would allow it to move forward with its investment in the Hillsboro operation and "will support U.S. solar technology leadership and preserve American jobs."
The company began production in Hillsboro in February 2019 with around 200 workers.
Just a few months later, SunPower put the property on the market and said it was auctioning off old cell-manufacturing equipment used by SolarWorld, which opened the plant in 2008. While SunPower said it would continue to make panels in leased space on the site, the move signaled a permanent downsizing of the factory from its SolarWorld heyday a decade ago, when around 1,000 people worked there.
About that time, as production peaked at the SolarWorld plant, cheap panels from a fast-growing, state-backed solar sector in China were beginning to flood the market, imperiling U.S. and European producers.
That led to two major rounds of tariff battles waged against China by SolarWorld and others. SolarWorld won some victories, but U.S.-based manufacturing continued to struggle to compete against massively scaled Asian plants.
Global technology company NTT Ltd. purchased the Hillsboro property for $63.5 million in September 2019, and early last year announced plans to build a data center there.
