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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.
Musk really has the vision and guts to push us in these areas that have languished for years (private space travel, electric cars, and now domestic electric power generation), and seems to be making them working concerns. If he gets even one past the tipping point, it's a lifelong career's worth of accomplishment. He may get the hat trick! Maybe we should pay attention to his alternative to the California high speed rail project...
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.
They're talking about purchase and installation:
"Because less modules are needed for the same power output, less land, labor, mounting structures, wiring and support racks are also required, saving an estimate of 10 cents a watt for every point of efficiency gained."
So if you're installing 4000 watts worth of panel, using 23% efficiency panels costs $400 less to purchase and install than 22% efficiency panels.
For many people, the limit on the size of their solar array is the size of their roof. If you want to offset your full usage, you may need higher-capacity panels than the standard 250W base panels. There are a number of higher-efficiency panels available, but the cost per Watt is higher. They probably don't cost much more to manufacture, so the more efficient panels have a higher profit margin.
Also, you have to keep improving your technology or you're out of the business when the cheap panels get to be as efficient than what you're producing.
They didn't have enough cash. The reason they are building the plant in Buffalo is because New York State as paying for most of the up front capital. Before Musk, they had to find creative ways to grow the company and were likely to get trampled in the market by a competitor with the money to make market moves that Silevo couldn't afford to do. With Musk behind them, they can grow at whatever pace they can convince Musk they can be profitable at.
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.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why Silevo didn't aim to be biggest?
Legitimate question, to which the summary provides no clue as to the likely answer.
Solar City is not just a manufacturer, they are also, in a sense, a distributed alternative utility. They do not sell panels to homeowners. Instead, they install solar systems on homes and sell the electricity produced to the homeowner. The advantage is that the homeowner has $0 upfront costs, and is guaranteed a specified level of savings over their current utility prices. So it's a much easier sell, since homeowners don't have to apply for a loan, cough up a down payment, make monthly payments and so on.
This model has been very successful at brining in sales, and Musk has been pretty successful at raising the enormous amounts of capital required to scale this model. (Solar City fronts the whole cost of installation, then earns that + profit back over a pretty long period of time.) It would be a heck of a challenge for a manufacturer of panels to go out and build the kind of business that Solar City has built.
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.
SpaceX to get Musk to Mars.
Tesla to move him around on Mars.
Solar City to power everything on Mars.
Musk is sticking with his plans to retire on Mars and all his companies are helping him get there.
It is not cut in half.
Well, our electricity expenses (i.e. the sum of the money we send to the power company, plus the money we send to SolarCity) went from $1000/month to $650/month.
You're right, that's not quite "cut in half", but $350/month in savings is nothing to sneeze at either, especially since achieving it cost us nothing but some roof space we weren't using anyway.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact