Industrial Sovereignty Is a Choice
The backdrop was fitting: Detroit is a symbol of America’s complicated relationship with industry. Cranes and restored buildings dot the riverfront, and the city is in the middle of its own partial economic recovery.
The Summit drew roughly 1,500 people. Many of them were young founders, operators, and engineers working to build hard things – nuclear reactors, autonomous systems, advanced materials, and robotics. Their conviction is simple: the American industrial decline that began at the end of the 20th century was a choice, not a fate. They are right. And we can choose to reverse this decline and change our fate.
Decades of short-sighted policies and capital outflows have meant that we’ve lost our manufacturing advantage in many core industries to China.
The important matter facing policymakers and business leaders, including many of those young innovators gathered in Detroit, is who holds the on-off switch to American industrial capacity? And if the answer is not us, how do we fix that?
I was invited to speak at Reindustrialize to share the experience of the solar industry, which offers two case studies with opposite outcomes – crystalline silicon solar, which the West lost to China, and thin film solar, which remains firmly in American hands.
The crystalline silicon solar cell was invented in the US at Bell Labs in 1954. As late as 2010, a small Michigan town was the world’s biggest polysilicon producer. In the early 2000s, Germany was the world’s largest producer of solar panels and China had no solar manufacturing industry of note.
Today, China, or companies dependent on Chinese supply chains, produces almost all the world’s crystalline silicon solar panels. And Germany spends billions on imported solar panels, 88% of which came from China in 2025.
The West’s loss of the industry was driven less by labor costs than by divergent industrial policy and commercial decisions by European manufacturers to outsource production – and, in the process, transfer expertise – to China.
Beijing designated solar a strategic industry in its 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, unlocking billions of dollars’ worth of subsidized land, electricity, tax incentives and state-bank credit lines guaranteed by local governments.
The Chinese government has sustained this commitment through every Five-Year Plan since and now holds the cards on crystalline silicon manufacturing equipment, raw materials, and finished products. Competing against that requires overcoming a state-backed structural advantage built over twenty years, and every year of further delay raises the cost of doing so.
On the other hand, you have American-invented cadmium telluride (CdTe) semiconductor technology, which remains in American hands.
Invented in Toledo, Ohio in the 1990s and scaled in the 2000s, First Solar produces this thin film technology across the nation with facilities spread across Alabama, Louisiana, and Ohio, and served by an American supply chain. These factories, which do not use Chinese manufacturing equipment, have enough capacity to serve roughly half of the U.S. annual utility-scale demand.
This is solar technology that is produced here, with no dependence on China’s crystalline silicon supply chains.
Two outcomes, in the same industry, against the same adversary, in the same decade.
CdTe thin film remains in American hands not just because it is structurally differentiated – different chemistry, different manufacturing, different supply chains – but because of deliberate decisions. Decisions not to manufacture in China – despite generous offers from the Chinese government – to systematically protect and build the intellectual property portfolio required, and to lean into American manufacturing and supply chains. To be clear, this long-game strategy played out in the absence of American industrial policy and in the face of China pumping billions in subsidies into its crystalline silicon industry.
The same choice now sits in front of us across every sector that matters strategically: critical minerals processing, advanced batteries, semiconductors. The reality, as the solar industry’s experience has shown, is that structural advantages compound, and so do structural dependencies.
The difference in outcome will be determined not by China’s intentions — those are settled — but by the choices American industry and American policy make about whether these sectors are built to be defensible.
The political consensus on American industrial policy is converging. What has not caught up is the operational arithmetic of the timelines involved. Building strategic manufacturing capacity from commitment to full production takes time. Rebuilding it, once lost, takes longer and costs more. Every year of sustained investment is a year of compounding capability. Every year of deferred commitment must be made up later, against an adversary that does not defer and is not subject to changing political cycles.
We are not too late. The thin-film story is proof that American manufacturing can hold strategic sectors against determined state-backed competition. What it requires is the discipline to understand which sectors can be defended, build them to be defensible, and sustain that commitment.
The on-off switches for American electricity, American manufacturing, and American strategic technology can stay in American hands. Whether they do is a choice being made right now. And from what I saw in Detroit this week, a lot of today’s builders have already decided how to answer it. That’s what drives my optimism.
Mark Widmar is the CEO of First Solar, Inc.