Due to a quirk of geology, the purest quartz in all the world comes from the picturesque town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The mineral, created deep within the earth when silicon-rich magmas cooled and crystallized some 370 million years ago, is essential to the production of computer chips and solar panels.
China, India, and Russia provide high purity quartz as well, but what’s mined there does not match the quality or quantity of what lies beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains. With Spruce Pine among the scores of Appalachian communities reeling from Hurricane Helene, the sudden closure of quartz mines that have supplied chip manufacturers for decades has rattled the global tech industry. But this quartz is vital to the solar industry too. And while industry experts expect companies to withstand the temporary closure of the town’s two mines, it highlights the precarity of a clean energy economy that relies on materials produced at a single location — especially in a world of increasingly ferocious natural disasters.
Helene’s impact on Spruce Pine “absolutely lays bare the danger of having a monopoly in any part of the supply chain,” said Debra DeShong, head of corporate communications at solar manufacturer QCells North America. QCells, which manufactures photovoltaic panels in Georgia and is building an additional facility that will manufacture the components needed to assemble them, is evaluating whether the Spruce Pine mine closures will impact it.