SolarCity has signed an agreement to acquire Silevo

http://blog.solarcity.com/silevo/

by ph0rque • 12 years ago

162 45 12 years ago

blog.solarcity.com

SEJeff• 12 years ago

This is one of the companies with Elon Musk helping drive the vision. They're going to go far.

kudithipudi• 12 years ago

The team @SolarCity and @Tesla continue to push the boundaries . I think this is going to change the landscape :)

jakozaur• 12 years ago

Silevo seems already have industry grade panels at 21% efficiency. That's quite a lot in home/utility panels: http://sroeco.com/solar/most-efficient-solar-panels (13 - 17%)

I can't find easily the price/W, but assuming they can produce panels at similar cost that's going to be huge.

dangravell• 12 years ago

Hmmm I might be wrong but I think that's a very specific test... they're only comparing 200W panels. SunPower make 20-21% efficient panels already.

alphydan• 12 years ago

The current efficiency record for research panels is around 44.7% [1] but commercial companies are above 22% (Sanyo, Panasonic, etc) [2]

[1] https://renooble.com/blog/2013/11/solar-panel-efficiency-new... [2] https://renooble.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/nrel_ef...

chanced• 12 years ago

Somewhat interesting that this occurs weeks after the tariff increase on subsidized Chinese solar panels. I wonder how closely those two events are aligned beyond mere coincidence.

felixbraun• 12 years ago

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.

Elon shining through here.

There is little doubt that SolarCity will be a huge deal.

rlanday2• 12 years ago

There’s a non-sequiter in that statement: the authors jump directly from “the sun emits an enormous amount of energy” to “it is feasible to capture and store several orders of magnitude more electricity than is currently consumed by human civilization using only solar panels and batteries.” That is a huge, huge leap.

myhf• 12 years ago

It's a huge, huge leap of multiplying the wattage of a solar panel by the number of solar panels manufactured and installed.

Looks like it would take less than 1% of the land area of the earth to satisfy the electricity consumption of humanity many times over:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=electricity+consumed+%2...

It doesn't seem like much of a leap to propose covering 1% of the world with buildings or roads or farms, so solar panels should seem the same.

jshen• 12 years ago

It's very easy to say such things, but the physics is much harder.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/12/wind-fights-sola...

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/08/solar-data-treas...

senthilnayagam• 12 years ago

good move. Tesla gigafactory would produce 50 GWh battery storage, they themselves need huge volumes of solar panels for their ever expanding charging stations network

startupfounder• 12 years ago

Take a step back.

With 1GW of solar capacity production in NY by 2017, 50GWh of battery production in the southwest by 2020, Tesla's and SpaceX's manufacturing facilities in CA, Elon's distributed clean generation, storage and transportation empire is concentrated in the USA.

All of these companies are becoming increasingly in control of their supply and distribution channels.

What's next, is Musk going to use SpaceX to mine asteroids for their metals to build increasingly inexpensive clean transportation, batteries and solar hardware back here on earth?

toomuchtodo2• 12 years ago

What did Dune say? "He who controls the Spice controls the Universe?" Carbon-based energy sources will not last forever, and even if they outlast us, using them will be catastrophic to the environment.

Elon is positioning himself as the provider of plentiful, clean energy generation and storage to the world (not to mention the provider of mobility and space transport). Is it too early to compare him to Rockefeller?

hueving• 12 years ago

What did Dune say? "He who controls the Spice controls the Universe?" Carbon-based energy sources will not last forever, and even if they outlast us, using them will be catastrophic to the environment.

That presupposes nothing can ever be done about the CO2 offset.

Is it too early to compare him to Rockefeller?

That would be an insult to him. Standard Oil did some of the shadiest anti-competitive stuff that resulted in many of the laws to protect against monopolies today. I assume you've seen the famous octopus drawing[1]? That didn't become popular because people thought Standard Oil was giving a warm hug to society.

The patent release alone shows his intentions are much difference from Rockefeller's.

1. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_oil_octopus_...

danmaz74• 12 years ago

The very abundance and ubiquity of solar energy makes it practically impossible that any Rockefeller could come out of that industry.

chris_mahan• 12 years ago

But that was because the Guild navigators needed the spice to fold space, to enable space travel.

Therefore, SpaceX.

(I can imagine Elon in a spice tank, with orange vapours).

(I include the British spelling since he's South African (he's also American and Canadian--do they say vapours in Canada?) Am I off-context enough yet?)

api• 12 years ago

I found Elon's secret business plan!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

kbenson3• 12 years ago

I like the section on "Forward-Looking Statements". While I'm sure some will take it as weasel-words to cover his ass (and I suspect if it was absent many of these people would find something -anything- else to critique), I think it's just prudence.

It comforts me to see a big announcement with a caveat, because I feel they are trying to be accurate instead of bombastic.

300bps• 12 years ago

Forward Looking Statements are a boilerplate disclaimer that publicly traded companies typically include anytime they talk about anything other than historical fact. If they don't include them and their plans change, they are at serious risk of being sued by their shareholders.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement

kbenson3• 12 years ago

I assumed as much (the SEC statement in it makes it fairly obvious). I almost threw in a few sentences about how I think if this is because the SEC, it's a very good side effect of informing investors.

I think the effect a statement like this has on normal people reading is to allow the original article to inform and excite while also containing expectations. It can dampen the more excitable of the populace, as well as those who like to set them off.

In all, regardless of why the statement is there, I think the fact that it is present is a good thing. I wasn't exactly assigning credit to Elon for it (the swipe at critics may have made it seem so), just talking in generalities.

torrenza• 12 years ago

Stock jumped 16% after that was released.

dang2• 12 years ago

We changed the title to the first part of the lede, since it says what the article is about.

tomp• 12 years ago

Is this the new policy? Should we also post subtitles/ledes instead of titles, if they make the post more informative?

dang2• 12 years ago

Not a new policy, but what I look at are HTML doc title, article title, top subtitle, and first sentence of the article, in that order. If the latter is significantly better than the article title, we sometimes use it, like we did here.

A good HN title is accurate and neutral (the opposite of misleading and linkbait). Rewriting is bad; it's far better to use words that are already there than to make up words of one's own. Taking words out in order to fit the 80-char limit is ok. Editorializing and spin are right out. Faithfulness to the original content (unless it is misleading or linkbait) is paramount. I think that's about it.

jguimont• 12 years ago

What keeps them from installing their system in every states or even Canada?

revelation• 12 years ago

Quite interesting, particularly considering Elons name is there. Elon was quite adamant in talking about SolarCity that they concentrate on the consumer-facing business, not producing solar cells, which as he explained is just slightly refined pure silicon with connectors slapped on, very much a commodity business where state actors like China are essentially subsidizing the West for buying solar panels in a bid to crush solar panel competition. So he didn't want to get into that.

Maybe, as with the Gigafactory, he sees an opportunity here.

Here is Elon saying making solar panels is a bad idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHHwXUm3iIg#t=2960

jccooper• 12 years ago

True. And yet, it's also a very Elon move: vertical integration, making a big bet on growth, and doing so domestically in spite of theoretically lower-cost foreign production. (You can see all those factors in Tesla and SpaceX.)

Perhaps the Silveo technology convinced him that solar cells are not always commodity. And then he went with his usual instinct.

trhway• 12 years ago

in vertically integrated business, even 2 times difference in the price of some basic parts/materials may not matter if that is just a fraction of the total price of the resulting product/service. If you own the high margin exit point like installation of the solar systems, you may be more worried about quality and the performance of the parts, stability of supply, etc... - the factors which can significantly affect your downstream high-margin part of the pipeline.

Add to that that Musk is going to own battery component of the solar systems as well.

tls• 12 years ago

It's been recently reported that China will not be able to side step tariffs anymore.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/04/us-usa-trade-solar...

marcell• 12 years ago

He isn't saying making solar panels is a bad idea. Rather, he is pointing out that, at the time of the interview, solar adoption in the US was limited by installation capacity, not production and management capacity. SolarCity has been working very hard an effectively on installing and managing rooftop solar systems, so it is possible that they are not limited on the production side, or that they have enough volume on the installation side to justify vertical integration.

johnohara• 12 years ago

The 35% U.S. federal subsidies for solar energy are due to expire in 2016. That's an important consideration.

Nice coup for New York and its rebranding strategy. Doesn't Sanyo have a big facility upstate?

Unfortunately, in all of this, we never see a discussion about individual ownership and transfer of excess SREC's.

ape4• 12 years ago

I have a small amount of roof space so want to buy efficient panels.

dredmorbius2• 12 years ago

Focus on cost, not efficiency, really.

There's plenty of space for solar energy all told, on a net-metering or grid basis. Unless you've got an absolutely compelling need to generate the maximum amount of energy from a minimum space and/or weight (say: you're building a satellite or space probe), just seek to keep $/kW as low as possible over the anticipated life of your panels.

SolarCity has signed an agreement to acquire Silevo

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