At the 2026 SAFE Summit, held in April 2026, T1 Energy CEO and Chairman Dan Barcelo spoke with Axios reporter Ben Geman, where he explained why clean-energy manufacturing isn’t struggling, it’s booming — and that Texas is the proof. 

Their conversation followed Dan’s path from a lifelong oil-and-gas career into solar, how politicization has slowed the adoption of solar as an extraordinarily low-cost and scalable energy source, and T1’s build-out of a domestic U.S. solar supply chain.

The following conversation covers:

• How T1’s 5-gigawatt module plant south of Dallas now employs more than 1,200 people, with a second solar plant rising at the site of a former Alcoa smelter in Milam County, Texas.
• Why Texas — with its risk-taking culture, permitting speed, and rare overlap of world-class solar and wind — has quietly overtaken California on both. 
• Why capital and financing, rather than operating cost, are now the real bottlenecks.
• How solar and oil-and-gas can reinforce one another as the U.S. expands LNG exports.

Along the way he unpacks the meaning behind T1’s name, describes how far America still trails China in installed solar and closes with a tip on the best barbecue in Austin.

Ben Geman: Good afternoon, everybody. Let’s get right into it. I’m really excited for this conversation, because I want to do a little bit of myth-busting. We’ve probably all heard some version of the narrative that this is a bad time to be in clean-energy manufacturing, and that it’s a very tough time to be in solar. It seems, though, that your experience in Texas rebuts both of those claims.

Daniel Barcelo: Good afternoon, everyone. I’ve done oil and gas my entire professional career, so I’m used to getting yelled at — used to being told that I’m the source of all evil, and so on. But when I pivoted into what people call renewable energy, I kept thinking to myself: this isn’t renewable. It’s just energy. I think we’ve done a disservice to solar — and maybe even to onshore wind and other energy sources — by treating it as polarizing, by politicizing it.

The framing of “we have to be sustainable, we have to do zero carbon, we have to hit net zero” is all great, but I think it misses the point. Solar — and especially solar plus storage — can be extraordinarily low-cost, extraordinarily scalable, and can complement the grid in many different ways. That’s a key thing for us.

When we moved to Texas, we acquired assets that were already in the United States. We finished construction, commissioned them, and we now have a 5-gigawatt solar module plant in South Dallas that employs over 1,200 people, with a payroll of over $100 million. That building was a warehouse before. We’re creating jobs and advanced manufacturing, and Texas was very open to that — the state has been great at attracting energy companies. For phase two, we’re building a 5-gigawatt solar cell plant north of Austin.

All of this ties back to Texas being the bastion of energy for so long. My entire oil-and-gas career — from Houston to Dallas to West Texas — always involved that arc, so coming back to it with solar felt very natural.

Ben Geman: What is it about Texas — the culture, the regulatory environment? When you decided to build that second factory, was there ever any doubt it would be in Texas? And if not, why not?

Daniel Barcelo: I’m a native New Yorker and I love New York, but Texas always had this draw — energy, building, risk-taking, scale… and tacos. During COVID there was a lot of movement toward Texas — Joe Rogan moving there, Elon Musk moving there — this flood of people. In my mind, when Tesla and SpaceX move to Austin, there are going to be so many derivative effects. I saw that as an interesting opportunity, and it turned out that way. Austin has a build culture — historically an old semiconductor culture. It’s the seat of Texas government, and it has a strong university network and a strong Dell network. All of that, now in the space of new manufacturing, made it a great place to draw from — whether capital markets in New York or tech talent in San Francisco. Now, when you’re in Austin, you ask someone where they’re from, because most people aren’t from there, and you find the unicorns being born there. That randomness — “what are you working on?” — gives it a real buzz for this moment in time.

Ben Geman: We hear so much about the potential for new projects to put steel in the ground. On your second facility, aren’t you about to literally put steel in the ground? Can you tell us about that?

Daniel Barcelo: Sure. Our second facility makes the solar cells that are a key input into the modules. We’re building it in Rockdale, Texas, in Milam County, about an hour north of Austin. Foundations are down, and we’ll be putting up steel this quarter. We’ve publicly announced that we’re looking to reach financial close this quarter as well. We raised capital about two weeks ago to continue the build, and things are still tracking toward starting production by the end of the year. That’s new Greenfield construction.

The site is an old Alcoa facility that used to employ thousands of people and had a lot of extra power. As with a lot of things in Texas, much of that power had been picked up years ago by Bitcoin miners. Now we’ll be using it for manufacturing, and we’ll supply those solar cells up to Dallas as an input to the modules. We’re buying our wafers and polysilicon from Hemlock Semiconductor and Corning.

So we’re creating that final chain — Michigan-based polysilicon and wafers feeding Texas-based cells and modules. It’s important to build that entire supply chain in the United States for polysilicon-based solar, which is the most efficient form of solar.

Ben Geman: So you’re building a completely domestic supply chain for this?

Daniel Barcelo: The core components will be domestic. There are other aspects — glass, glues — where so much of the supply chain is Southeast Asian, but we’re working as fast as we can to make them domestic. At the same time, we want to make sure the developers and users of our product stay cost-competitive, so we’re very tough with our U.S. suppliers, too. One of them, NexPower, makes steel frames, and they’ll be making those in the U.S. and in Texas. Sourcing frames domestically makes sense logistically, but it also has to make sense on cost. We’re looking at solar glass, encapsulants, and adhesives — simple things like certain glues could be made in the U.S. They just haven’t been, because we lost a lot of that manufacturing base to other parts of the world. It begs the question: can the U.S. compete? I think the answer is a resounding yes.

One reason solar can compete is that it’s fundamentally a conversion of silica and polysilicon — through a chain of machines — back into glass and silica. Apart from the machines, the main operating input is energy: specialty gases, fresh water, wastewater. When you look at those inputs, the U.S. can be very competitive, and Texas in particular can be extremely competitive on specialty gases, natural gas, water, and power. That’s a big advantage.

What America needs to do better isn’t the operating side — it’s capital. On capital, we’re still slow compared with the rest of the world. Maybe not slower than Europe — we’re probably faster than Europe — but slower than everyone else. Some of that is rooted in code and permitting. I’m not saying we should ever do anything that harms people or the environment or creates risk, but there are so many ways to build that are both safe and faster. It’s all about speed to market and speed to power, and we have to get that right.

Ben Geman: Texas is clearly an attractive place to build, but it’s also a place to deploy solar — and almost any other energy technology. What do you see as the biggest growth areas for solar deployment in Texas, whether grid-connected or co-located with different types of facilities?

Daniel Barcelo: There’s an expression — I don’t want to call it cliché — that an hour of sunshine in Texas could power the world for a day. That’s a tremendous amount of potential energy. Of course, we need to capture it and store it over time with batteries.

We actually named the company T1 — for a Type 1 civilization, which gets most of its energy from its nearest star and stores it for later use. It’s a hat tip to that whole concept.

Ben Geman: That’s interesting — I did not know that.

Daniel Barcelo: Yes — it’s not “Terminal One.” But on the use of energy: if you look at world maps for solar radiation, you’ll see certain places on Earth have better patterns. Around Houston, closer to the water, you get more cloud cover — but from West Texas through Arizona, Nevada, and California, you have phenomenal irradiation and very high potential.

Texas is unique. We only do solar — we don’t do wind — but onshore wind has a corridor running straight down the center of the United States. When you look at West Texas in particular, you get an overlap of great solar and great wind that doesn’t really exist in most industrializable places on Earth. You have both forms of energy providing almost zero marginal cost — wind tends to peak in the evenings and at night, solar during the day — so you can get extraordinarily low prices.

We’re already seeing that in the Permian in West Texas, where a lot of power is used to electrify pumps that pull more oil and gas out of the ground. More and more of those pumps are switching from diesel to electricity. You saw it with Bitcoin mining a few years ago, too. There are CREZ lines — built in the mid-2000s to haul power to Dallas, Austin, and Houston — and where those lines intersect, you have tremendous amounts of power that’s 90%-plus solar and wind, at extraordinarily low cost.

When you couple that ecosystem together — and granted, most industry isn’t in West Texas today — you create real potential for what should be there: steel, aluminum, fertilizer, even desalination. You could run desalination plants — even if not 24/7, just during the day at zero marginal cost — coupled with hydrogen or fertilizer production. You can start having crazy thoughts, even about terraforming, once you get to that zero-cost level. Now, I’m separating the marginal cost of solar from the capital requirements — those are still complicated. It’s still hard to finance.

It still requires contracts and work with developers. Developers then go to the big hyperscalers or utilities, who want the lowest PPA prices, and the banks all want terms and long-term commitments. So the capex side is still a bottleneck for deploying capital. But on a cash operating basis, once these assets are in, they become extraordinarily low-cost — and that creates some of the natural tensions. The grid in Texas wasn’t built because Texas wanted to be the big green state.

They’re not the big green state by legacy — they’re the oil-and-gas state. And yet they’ve achieved it: they beat California on solar, and they beat California on wind. Now they have this tremendous resource for hyperscalers and data centers. It’s all because they allowed risk-taking, less bureaucracy, and faster builds — and because they had good natural resources: good solar and good wind, just like they have good oil and good gas.

Ben Geman: I’m glad you mentioned the Permian and oil and gas. In the domestic power sector there’s some competition between solar and gas. But with the macro picture right now — the war in Iran — putting a spotlight on the U.S. posture around oil and gas exports, what do you see as the relationship between growing those exports and our geopolitical leverage? Is there a nexus between solar power and our ability to continue or even expand those exports?

Daniel Barcelo: I think they’re very collaborative. Just like the Permian example, where solar supports the electrification of pumps to produce more — the more solar available on the Texas or U.S. grid, the more molecules can be exported as oil or natural gas.

Exporting that is important. In some ways it exports the best of America — American exceptionalism — around the world. Europe needs our LNG, Asia needs LNG, China needs LNG. That ability to export is extraordinarily valuable, and it probably fetches a higher price than what we sell it for here. We’re not exporting solar yet. But people forget: America wasn’t the number-one producer of gas — Russia was — and now it’s America. America wasn’t number one in oil — Saudi Arabia was — and now it’s America. China has about 1.2 to 1.3 terawatts of installed solar capacity; America has 50 to 60 gigawatts. That’s nothing.

America has the land and the manufacturing capacity. It could so easily reach those levels and be a strong player. So it’s important that all-of-the-above energy sources work. And when you can start manufacturing energy rather than drilling for it, you really enable distributed energy to work across the United States in the form of solar.

Ben Geman: Those numbers are staggering — and exciting, because they suggest a massive runway. As our time runs short: you’re a relatively recent transplant to Austin and Texas. For people in the audience who live there or are visiting, what’s the best place to go for barbecue after they land or arrive?

Daniel Barcelo: Well, my CFO makes a mean barbecue, so first I’ll invite everyone to my house — when my CFO is there, not me. Other than that, it’s easiest to go to La barbecue on the east side of Austin. Phenomenal barbecue. It might be tainted now because it got a Michelin star — and we all know how that goes once the Michelin stars start coming — but right now it’s the best barbecue in Austin.

Ben Geman: Thank you for the recommendation, and for the great conversation. I really appreciate it.

Daniel Barcelo: Thank you. Thanks, everybody.