By David Robinson | News Business Reporter

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="392"] SolarCity says solar panels to be made at its Buffalo plant will be the most efficient in the world, even more efficient than the Silevo solar panels shown being installed here. (Derek Gee/Buffalo News file photo)[/caption]

The solar panels that SolarCity plans to begin making in South Buffalo next year will be the most efficient rooftop modules that are being made anywhere in the world, the company said Friday.

The panels will be able to convert a little more than 22 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity – a milestone that SolarCity executives said will help it reduce the costs of its rooftop solar energy systems and make them more competitive with utility-generated electricity.

“It’s a world record for a rooftop panel,” said Jonathan Bass, a SolarCity spokesman.

“It’s another feather in the cap of the Buffalo region,” Bass said. “It will be the site where the world’s best solar panel is manufactured.”

The efficiency of the solar panels is important because SolarCity and other solar energy firms are scrambling to reduce their costs before the scheduled expiration of a 30 percent federal tax credit on solar energy systems at the end of next year. Without the tax credit, solar energy systems in many parts of the country will struggle to compete with the cost of electricity produced by conventional sources, such as natural gas.

By combining high-efficiency panels with cost savings that come from producing solar modules on a massive scale at its Buffalo factory – which will be the biggest solar panel plant in the Western Hemisphere with an annual capacity to produce enough solar panels to generate 1-gigawatt of electricity – SolarCity hopes to push down the price of solar energy systems to the point where they don’t need to rely on government subsidies.

Local production next year

The $900 million Buffalo factory, going up on the former Republic Steel site on South Park Avenue, will span 1.2 million square feet and have the capacity to produce between 9,000 and 10,000 solar panels each day, once it reaches full production sometime in early 2017. The company hopes to begin production on a limited scale during the first half of next year and gradually increase the plant’s output. Once the plant is running full tilt, it is expected to employ 1,460 workers, with another 1,440 people working at local businesses that provide supplies and services to the factory.

The project is the centerpiece of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion economic development initiative. The state is using $750 million in taxpayer money to build the factory and purchase its equipment in an effort to turn the Buffalo Niagara region into a hub for solar energy manufacturing.

“The selection of SolarCity was, in part, already based on the demonstrated superior quality of their product,” said Alain R. Kaloyeros, the president of the SUNY Polytechnic Institute and the governor’s point man on the SolarCity project.

“This was a necessary condition in our selection process to ensure that SolarCity remains way ahead of any Chinese competition in the marketplace. The coupling of higher quality panels with a truly competitive business model places SolarCity at the forefront of the solar industry,” Kaloyeros said.

Fewer panels needed

The high-efficiency SolarCity panels will allow the company to design rooftop panels that produce the same amount of electricity as current systems, but with fewer panels. The improved efficiency also will reduce other costs associated with rooftop solar systems by requiring less mounting equipment and less wiring.

“Fewer panels per project means lower installation costs,” Bass said.

Most standard solar panels used today are about 17 percent to 18 percent efficient. SolarCity executives said the higher-efficiency panels will allow them to produce 30 percent to 40 percent more power than standard panels of the same size.

The manufacturing process that SolarCity will use, which draws heavily from the same techniques and equipment used to produce semiconductors, also costs significantly less than the methods used to produce other types of high-efficiency panels, the company said.

Tweaking junctions

When SolarCity bought Silevo, a fledgling California solar panel manufacturer, in June 2014, the company’s solar panels could work at 21 percent efficiency in a laboratory setting. Since then, SolarCity engineers have been able to improve the efficiency of the Silevo technology by tweaking the production process and improving the quality of junctions within the module, said Ben Heng, SolarCity’s senior vice president for pilot manufacturing.

SolarCity will begin to produce the higher-efficiency modules in small quantities later this month at its 100-megawatt pilot facility, located in the former Solyndra plant in Fremont, Calif. The production then will shift to Buffalo as the plant here comes on line.

SolarCity, the nation’s largest residential solar energy installer, plans to use all of the panels produced at the Buffalo plant on the rooftop solar energy systems that it installs on homes. SolarCity installed 34 percent of all the U.S. residential solar systems that were put into operation during the first half of this year. Only one other residential solar installer – Vivint Solar – had more than a 3 percent market share, according to a report issued this week by GTM Research. Vivent had 12 percent of the market.

email: drobinson@buffnews.com