Elon Musk's Solar City Is Ramping Up Solar Panel Production

MarkWhittington writes: Elon Musk is well known as a private space flight entrepreneur, thanks to his space launch company SpaceX. He is also a purveyor of high end electric cars manufactured by his other company, Tesla Motors. But many people do not know that Musk has a third business, Solar City, which is a manufacturer of solar panels. On Tuesday that company announced a major play to increase the output of solar panels suitable for home solar units. Solar City has acquired a company called Silevo, which is said to have a line of solar panels that have demonstrated high electricity output and low cost. Silevo claims that its panels have achieved a 22 percent efficiency and are well on their way to achieving 24 percent efficiency. It suggests that 10 cents per watt is saved for every point of efficiency gained. Solar City, using the technology it has acquired from Silevo, intends to build a manufacturing plant in upstate New York with a one gigawatt per year capacity. This will only be the beginning as it intends to build future manufacturing plants with orders of magnitude capacity. The goal appears to be for the company to become the biggest manufacturer of solar panels in the world.

Comments

Re:Not more solar energy!!

[OneSmartFellow]

The sun is the BEST source of power there is. It powers all life on this planet.

The problem is not the power source, it's how to store it. Plants do that pretty well, our problem is we're inneficient at extracting that power to produce electricty.

Luckily we're highly efficient at extracting it to produce body heat.

Re:Engineering win

[GameboyRMH]

Once I heard that solar panels output more energy in their service lifespan than it takes to manufacture them. Is that true?

For all solar panels except those used on satellites, yes.

Then there is no reason to not make as many as possible. It's an epic win on the engineering/physical science level.

It would not be an epic win for our monied overlords so it's not so straightforward.

Re:It's not the materials, per se

[drinkypoo]

The sustainability of solar panels is tied to the end-user cost per kWh.

Unfortunately, it has to compete with forms of power for which sustainability is not even being considered, obviously namely coal and oil. As long as the cost of cleaning up the pollution of using "traditional" energy-generating sources is handwaved away, solar's gonna have a bad time.

Re:It's not the materials, per se

[necro81]

Right now a typical installation (complete, by a contractor, not DIY) is $7/watt for residential, and sunny places like LA get 5-5.5 hours/day, or 1800-1900h/year, with most panels warrantied for 20 years. That's 37000Wh life per panel watt, or 37kWh

you need to refresh your dimensional analysis, because you are missing a term or two. 1800-1900h/year * 20 years = 37000 hours of productive life per panel, not 37000 watt-hours of total output. If the total lifetime output of a solar panel over 20 years was a measly 37 kWh (roughly the daily energy consumption of a home in the United States) no one would buy them.

What's missing in your analysis is the power output of the panel during those daylit hours. For the 5 hours of peak generation during the day, you could expect about 200 W for a "standard" panel. (You'll get not-insignificant power generation during all daylight hours, but we'll focus on peak generation for now.) That brings the lifetime output to something like 7.4 MWh, which at wholesale (not residential customer) electrical rates of $50/MWh equates to $370 worth of electricity. Even taking net present value into consideration, the energy cost breakeven for manufacturing solar cells is measured in years, if not months.

Solar panels are not merely an energy storage device that captures conventional energy sources during their manufacture, only to trickle that energy out with sunshine. They are a net energy producer many times over. With (currently impractical, not-at-scale) methods for storing and buffering the power, it is feasible to power the entire PV manufacturing and installation pipeline entirely with solar power.

Musk, please takes steps and be careful.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Musk is treading on some big toes. When he went into electric cars, no one took him seriously. But he proved them wrong, smeared eggs on the faces of performance/luxury car makers, earned the enmity of car dealers across the nation. That has earned him a reputation and now he is being taken quite seriously.

Now he is upsetting another huge industry with trillion dollars in assets, the electric utility companies. And the technique he is using requires someone with great credibility to raise incredible sums of money. Solar never threatened utilities before because, the system cost was high, and individual home owners had to do some complex breakeven analysis, raise funds and take some risk. But Solar City is zero risk to the home owners, perfect distributed competitor to the utilities, plans to make electricity using zero cost fuel (sunlight). The entire cost is cost of servicing debt. Interest rates are lowest in known memory.

The technology and the business model will make it immaterial who the prime-movers are backing it. But the speed at which change happens depends on a charisma and credibility of players like Musk. The utility companies would not hesitate to find scandals, astro turf to create fake scandals, engage in character assassination etc to bring him down personally. So he should be careful with his dealings.