Tue, Jun 17, 2014, 11:41 PM EDT - U.S. Markets closed
Elon Musk takes on carbon with solar, battery bets
By JONATHAN FAHEY
6 hours ago
FILE - In this June 18, 2010,
file photo, U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, D-Colo., center, helps as
SolarCity employees Jarret Esposito, left, and Jake Torwatzky, install a
solar panel on a home in south Denver. SolarCity, one of the nation's
largest installers of rooftop solar systems, on Tuesday, June 17, 2014
announced it is buying Silveo, a solar panel manufacturer. (AP Photo/Ed
Andrieski, File)
"If we don't do this we felt there was a risk of not being able to have the solar panels we need to expand the business in the long term," Musk said Tuesday in a conference call.
Musk is also a founder and the CEO of the electric vehicle maker Tesla Motors, which is planning what it calls a "gigafactory" to supply batteries for its cars.
In
both cases, Musk's goal is to make sure that the components critical to
his vision of the future — electric cars and solar energy — are
available and cheap enough to beat fossil fuels.
Musk's future
customers could ignore traditional energy companies completely. They
would have SolarCity panels on their roof that would generate enough
power to also charge up a Tesla in the garage. A Tesla battery could
then power the home at night with stored solar power.
It's
a far-off vision — solar power is still much more expensive than
conventional power, even before the enormous cost of a battery backup.
And electric cars are less than 1 percent of the total auto market. But
Musk has made a career of thinking far into the future. He is also the
CEO of SpaceX, the rocket company with an ultimate goal of enabling
people to live on other planets.
SolarCity, based in San Mateo,
California, is one of the nation's largest installers of rooftop solar
systems. It was founded and is now run by Musk's cousins, CEO Lyndon
Rive and Chief Technology Officer Peter Rive. The company also offers
financing for solar systems, and last year it bought a manufacturer of
mounting systems used to hold panels in place.
The
acquisition of Silevo is a risk for Musk and SolarCity because it gets
the company into panel manufacturing at a time when a global glut of
panels has decimated the profits of panel makers. Some, including
onetime industry leader Suntech Power, were forced into bankruptcy.
Others were forced into solar development and installations, the kinds
of things SolarCity already excels at.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SolarCity shares were up almost 14 percent in midday trading Tuesday.
SolarCity
says it won't try to turn out more of the garden-variety panels now
clogging the market. Instead, it wants to make panels that are more
efficient, and make them at a low cost in huge factories in order to
reduce the overall cost of solar electricity. Silevo's relatively
complex panels generate more power per square foot than typical panels.
SolarCity
said it is negotiating with the state of New York to build what would
be among the biggest factories in the world in the next two years. It
would manufacture enough panels each year to produce 1 gigawatt of peak
power — roughly enough panels to outfit 200,000 homes with a
typical-sized rooftop system.
That would be "just a start," Musk said. Future factories would produce 10 gigawatts worth of panels.
And
these panels wouldn't even look like typical solar panels, he said.
Just as he drew customers to electric vehicles by making sleek, fast
sports cars, Musk wants to attract homeowners to solar with pretty
panels.
"We want to have a cool-looking aesthetically pleasing solar system on your roof," he said.
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Jonathan Fahey can be reached at http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey .
end quote from:
Elon Musk takes on carbon with solar, battery bets
NEW YORK (AP) — The energy world is not keeping up with Elon Musk, so he's trying to take matters into his own hands.
Associated Press
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