Chinese solar behemoth Trina Solar, which is affiliated with the Chinese military, provides manufacturing and training support to T1 Energy, earns commission on T1’s sales, and is a principal shareholder of T1
T1 Energy, a startup solar panel maker that says it is “bringing solar technology and know-how back to America,” is making a push to retain eligibility for some of the most generous U.S. tax benefits even as the Trump administration prepares to crack down on “green energy” businesses’ ties to China. T1 is certainly vulnerable to the looming crackdown: The company maintains business ties to a massive Chinese solar company that is led by a member of the Chinese Communist Party and subsidized by the Chinese government, according to financial disclosures reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, something experts say could disqualify T1 from the tax credits it is seeking.
T1 was formed after Changzhou, China-based Trina Solar, one of the five largest solar panel manufacturers in the world, sold its newly constructed Texas solar panel factory to the firm in December 2024. Trina had built the plant anticipating that doing so would make it eligible to receive U.S. tax credits designed to encourage more green energy production, but sold it amid heightened bipartisan scrutiny of Chinese companies taking advantage of such tax credits.
Last week, the Pentagon placed Trina on its list of companies affiliated with the Chinese military. In addition, the company’s founder and CEO, Gao Jifan, serves as a deputy to the 14th National People’s Congress, which is China’s national legislature and has been described as the country’s “highest organ of state power.”
Under President Donald Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, projects that are owned or controlled by Chinese companies are denied eligibility for the tax credits in question. The Trump Treasury Department is soon expected to finalize rules for how it will enforce those restrictions, something that could be the difference between a company receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax benefits or receiving nothing. T1 sold its first batch of credits for $160 million late last year (its gross profit in 2025 was $55.6 million, for comparison).
While T1 has sought to distance itself from Trina and has repeatedly said it is building a domestic supply chain as the Trump administration develops those rules, Trina remains the company’s second-largest shareholder. According to financial disclosures filed late last month, Trina owns 30.7 million shares in T1, equivalent to an 11 percent stake in the company and worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That makes Trina a principal shareholder in T1, a formal classification that means it has significant influence over the company.
T1 separately reported in its annual filing with the SEC in late March that it maintains a business relationship with Trina: The Chinese solar behemoth remains under contract with T1 to provide advisory, manufacturing, training, and logistics support at T1’s Texas plant. Trina also handles the marketing and sales for solar panels made at the plant. In exchange for its services, T1 pays Trina a share of its earnings and a commission on its sales. Those contracts don’t expire until late 2029.
In addition, T1 reported that Trina was by far its largest customer in 2025, selling it a total of $632.2 million worth of solar panels that year, according to its SEC filing. At the same time, T1 manufactured those solar panels using Trina’s components and services—according to Trina’s own disclosures, in 2025, it sold T1 $95.5 million in goods and $45.8 million in labor.
During the first three months of 2026, T1 reported sales of $177.4 million to Trina and reported purchases of $119 million from Trina while paying the Chinese company $8.5 million in commissions and royalty fees, according to T1’s latest quarterly filing submitted in May. The three figures each represent significant year-over-year increases. T1’s sales to Trina have been 99.9 percent of its total net sales in 2026 so far.
The Free Beacon reported that T1 reached an agreement with Trina in late 2025 to license Trina’s solar technology not from Trina directly, but from a company in Singapore. T1 made the deal to distance itself from Trina while ensuring it could use its technology. Company spokesman Russell Gold said at the time that Trina “has no control over T1 Energy, period.”
And T1 announced this month that it had purchased the battery storage company Kore Power. The Free Beacon reported in February 2024 that the company is co-owned by Chinese battery company DFD New Energy, which is run by a Chinese Communist Party official. In response, KORE Power said that “reducing the equity stake of Chinese shareholders has been a priority of KORE.”
T1 declined to comment.
T1’s continued business ties to Trina appear to undercut the American-made image it has presented and could threaten its effort to retain eligibility for green energy production tax credits. According to advocates for the American solar energy sector, it presents an important test case for the Trump Treasury Department as it decides how aggressively it will enforce the restrictions laid out by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“T1 is the one that’s just been out there so much that if we don’t do something there to signal that there’s going to be enforcement and that we’re going to be looking at these things very closely, I think that it’s going to happen over and over and over,” Thomas Beline, a partner with the trade law firm Cassidy Levy Kent with experience representing U.S. solar companies in China-related litigation, told the Free Beacon, adding that the T1 case is the “tip of the spear.”
Nathan Picarsic, the cofounder of the Washington, D.C., supply chain research firm Horizon Advisory, argued that the Treasury Department should implement a multi-pronged test that accounts for various ways Chinese companies can exert control over an American company. Doing so would ensure that companies that appear American, but are effectively controlled by Chinese entities, do not receive U.S. tax benefits.
“It looks like T1 is playing this game as smartly as they can, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty,” he said in an interview.
“The risk of dependence and the supply chain risk isn’t as simple as just equity ownership,” Picarsic continued. “The ties that can come from supply dependency or from depending overly on a few different customers induce some of the same risks. That places this challenge on the Treasury Department and IRS to be thoughtful about the complexity of the supply chains and the way that Chinese state-backed actors are looking to sow dependence.”
Trina, meanwhile, is itself closely linked to the Chinese government. In addition to its ties to the Chinese military and Chinese Communist Party, Trina has also received substantial subsidies from the Chinese government while evading U.S. tariffs.
China’s five-year plans, which serve as a blueprint for its economic and industrial priorities, have emphasized the importance of growing the nation’s solar industry for two decades. As such, China continues to dominate the global solar supply chain, according to the International Energy Agency.
“China seeks to dominate the solar industry as a matter of national strategy, and they even want America to pay for Chinese dominance with U.S. tax credits,” said Michael Lucci, the founder, chairman, and CEO of the China watchdog group State Armor. “Federal authorities should closely scrutinize any American companies that are deeply tied to the CCP’s solar national champions, and deny them tax credits if the ultimate beneficiary is a CCP-controlled company.”
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