Site Selection Magazine: Multiple Visions: The billions and the visionaries keep flocking to Buffalo. Really.

Site Selection Magazine: Multiple Visions: The billions and the visionaries keep flocking to Buffalo. Really.

Published:
Friday, October 10, 2014 - 12:46
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Site Selection Magazine

The Tesla Gigafactory plan for battery production in western Nevada got all the attention this summer. But there's another billion-dollar gigafactory in the works in western New York from yet another Elon Musk-affiliated company.

California-based SolarCity, co-founded by CEO Lyndon Rive and his brother Peter and chaired by their cousin Musk, marked the beginning of fall in September with a groundbreaking at the former Republic Steel manufacturing site in South Buffalo for what will eventually be the largest solar panel manufacturing complex in the Western Hemisphere. The SolarCity GigaFactory will have annual capacity of 1 gigawatt at full production, and will create more than 3,000 jobs in the region and 5,000 jobs statewide.

"This is bigger than anything we could have imagined," said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at the groundbreaking. "It is the perfect metaphor for Buffalo, where the fundamental strength was the available hydropower. That hydropower now, that renewable energy now, will fuel the renewable energy industry for the future. I am incredibly proud that the state is playing a role in this project, because Buffalo's future is New York's future, and today that future is brighter than ever."

The project quintuples the output and economic impact of the originally planned project from silicon solar cell and module maker Silevo, announced in November 2013 along with a facility from LED manufacturer Soraa. SolarCity in June announced it would acquire Silevo.

"This acquisition will redefine SolarCity's path, from installer and service-company to a vertically integrated total solution provider," said Frost & Sullivan Visionary Innovation Consultant Pramod Dibble of the $200-million deal. "The market faces oversupply from fairly low-efficiency panels, but introducing a clearly superior technology option, from the market leader in residential solar, may just be the disruption needed to rock the landscape."

Dibble was speaking metaphorically, but the Buffalo landscape will be rocked concretely. The SolarCity GigaFactory will be located at the Buffalo High-Tech Manufacturing Innovation Hub at RiverBend, a new START-UP NY site owned by the State University of New York's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. SolarCity, the nation's largest solar power provider, will spend $5 billion over the next decade in connection with the creation and operation of the facility in New York, and New York State will invest a total of $750 million through the Buffalo Billion and other state resources to establish infrastructure, construct the 1.2-million-sq.-ft. facility and purchase required equipment.

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