This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

solarcity head

For a while in that location, there was a chance that solar expansion was in problem. In the United states, the federal Investment Tax Credit is set to stop in 2022, which many believe will slow adoption, even as technology gets better than always. Without an outside funder forcing solar to brand good financial sense, the simply way the tech could survive is if information technology started making that same sense all on its own. Now, Elon Musk's solar power venture SolarCity has taken some other major pace toward that goal, announcing a new solar panel product that can produce power for well-nigh $0.55 per watt.

The efficiency of the panels themselves can reach 22.5%, which makes them the most efficient residential panels ever created. On the surface, this seems to only mildly outpace the 21.5% efficiency achieved by the prior leader, SunPower. However, the whole entreatment of this new SolarCity panel is its affordability, and the venerable SunPower solar cells are much more than expensive than the boilerplate. We don't yet have final pricing for these new SolarCity panels, but with the price of solar plummeting in recent years they've got to be fairly cheap to compete.

How Solar Works
The annunciation comes as a upshot of SolarCity's acquisition of Silevo, a solar manufacturing startup that boasted a new, high efficiency panel architecture. The visitor calls it Triex technology, and it incorporates crystalline silicon with thin films and circuitous tunneling junctions for electron management. What'due south of import is that the technology is not physically all that different from existing silicon semiconductor structures, significant that Silevo did not have to reinvent the wheel in lodge to revolutionize information technology.

solarcity 3With the acquisition of Silevo, SolarCity also became one of only four "vertically integrated" solar companies in the US, meaning that information technology can now handle its own business all the fashion from manufacturing through sales on to and installation. That will help them continue costs down too, peculiarly if this new technology ends upwardly being its core, all-time-selling dwelling product. SolarCity is already the largest installer in the United states, and with Musk's penchant for enormous manufacturing plants like the Gigafactory, it could make a run for manufacturing as well.

These new solar panels volition exist manufactured in Buffalo, NY, at a facility chosen Riverbend. They're entirely products of the U.s.a. (minus the raw materials), just like Tesla'south car batteries, The company hopes that Riverbend can produce up to 10,000 panels per day, and employ something similar two,000 people in the process.

Riverbend in Buffalo, NY.

Riverbend in Buffalo, NY.

Of course, affordability is only a relative term, and whether the panels are insufficiently inexpensive doesn't necessarily mean you can afford them, peculiarly without government subsidies. In that spirit, SolarCity actually wrote a weblog post advising that we need to move past the idea of solar power existing only on residential rooftops. It advocates for a more diverse set up of installations, like including customs solar for powering modest clusters of homes.

Solar ability all the same isn't right for everybody, everywhere, and that will but go more truthful if federal subsidies dry out up. But it'southward becoming right for a larger and larger proportion of the land, and fairly apace, too. With full command of the procedure, SolarCity can now start to control the price per kilowatt hour directly, and SpaceX has made it clear what happens when you lot allow Elon Musk muck with the status quo.