Solar City to Build One-Gigawatt Plant in N.Y.

The future-thinking guy who brought us the Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, has another company you might not have heard of by the name of Solar City, in San Mateo, California. Solar City is one of the top solar panel installation companies in the U.S., and they have just acquired a company called Silevo, which makes solar panels that are said to achieve unheard of electrical output at low cost. Using Silevo technology, Solar City plans to build a manufacturing plant in upstate New York with a one gigawatt per year capacity. But this will only be the beginning, as they intend to build even more manufacturing plants in the future with several higher orders of magnitude capacity. The goal appears to be for the company to become the biggest manufacturer of solar panels in the world.

Given that there seems to be excess solar panel supplier capacity today, this may seem counter-intuitive to some who follow the solar industry. But what Solar City says is that the panels being made today have low efficiency and cost too much. The future, they say, is that industry must start making solar panels that provide higher output at lower cost in order to meet the massive volume of affordable, high efficiency panels needed in order to provide unsubsidized solar power to the world and outcompete the fossil fuel grid power simply that is destroying our planet.

According to Musk, SolarCity was founded to accelerate mass adoption of sustainable energy. The sun, that highly convenient and free fusion reactor in the sky, radiates more energy to the Earth in a few hours than the entire human population consumes from all sources in a year. This means that solar panels, paired with batteries to enable power at night, can produce several orders of magnitude more electricity than is consumed by the entirety of human civilization.

Even if the solar industry were only to generate 40 percent of the world’s electricity with photovoltaics by 2040, that would mean installing more than 400 GW of solar capacity per year for the next 25 years. Musk says, "We absolutely believe that solar power can and will become the world’s predominant source of energy within our lifetimes, but there are obviously a lot of panels that have to be manufactured and installed in order for that to happen. The plans we are announcing today, while substantial compared to current industry, are small in that context."