The nice thing about the Solar City business model is that they do not live and die by the price of solar panels, that is, if the Chinese decide to subsidize solar panels to the point of giving them away, Solar City’s core business just gets better, as their “product” is not panels, but the contracts by which they install the panels for free on rooftops, and take a portion of the energy savings in payment.
That said, as my recent video pointed out, we are on the leading edge of an unprecedented buildout of solar energy, and Elon Musk and co. have taken steps to insure that the sheer volumes of solar panels that will be needed in the near future will be available.
Elon Musk’s alternate-energy aspirations don’t end with Tesla’s electric vehicles.
Musk is also chairman of SolarCity, a firm responsible for three times the solar panel installations as its closest competitor. Along with executives Peter Rive and Lyndon Rive, Musk announced this week that the company will create a solar plant that would be the equivalent of Tesla’s “gigafactory” plan announced earlier this year.
“We are in discussions with the state of New York to build the initial manufacturing plant, continuing a relationship developed by the Silevo team. At a targeted capacity greater than 1 GW within the next two years, it will be one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world,” the trio wrote in a company blog post.
We are in discussions with the state of New York to build the initial manufacturing plant, continuing a relationship developed by the Silevo team. At a targeted capacity greater than 1 GW within the next two years, it will be one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world. This will be followed in subsequent years by one or more significantly larger plants at an order of magnitude greater annual production capacity.
Given that there is excess supplier capacity today, this may seem counter-intuitive to some who follow the solar industry. What we are trying to address is not the lay of the land today, where there are indeed too many suppliers, most of whom are producing relatively low photonic efficiency solar cells at uncompelling costs, but how we see the future developing. Without decisive action to lay the groundwork today, the massive volume of affordable, high efficiency panels needed for unsubsidized solar power to outcompete fossil fuel grid power simply will not be there when it is needed.
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. A cogent assessment of sustainable energy potential from various sources is described well in this Sandia paper:www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf.
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. 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.
Installing 400 GW of nuclear in the USA would eliminate the vast bulk of fossil-fired electric generation all by itself.
You’re taking a statement meant for world capacity and applying it to capacity for only the United States, which of course makes your statement sound more impressive – but it is also trickery.
Granted, we’d have to build significantly more solar capacity plus battery backups to equal the same output from nuclear – but you could have said that by itself.
Incidentally, and just for scale, building 400GW of nuclear power in just the United States would be more than all the currently installed nuclear in the world:
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm
Fine, multiply by 5 then (2011 electric consumption world-wide was a bit over 20,000 TWH. At 400 GW a year it would take a whole 5 years.
Could you even build enough batteries, and what of the FF overhead in the production?
In my lifetime, world nuclear generation capacity has gone from less than 1 GW to over 370 GW. I think 2 TW is achievable if we put our minds to it.