After buying Silevo last June, SolarCity expanded plans for its mammoth factory in South Buffalo but is not abandoning Silicon Valley. Solar City is leasing two buildings in Fremont to house Silevo’s headquarters and research and development operations. The company is taking two buildings left vacant when high profile solar panel firm Solyndra went belly up in 2011.
Silevo was a strategic purchase by SolarCity. Its solar technology and manufacturing techniques have produced modules that have achieved a unique combination of high energy output and low cost. The Silicon Valley Business Journal has the scoop:
The lease, which has not been previously reported, facilitates a new R&D center and headquarters for Silevo — the Fremont-based startup that SolarCity acquired last year to gain its own panel-manufacturing muscle for the first time. Contractors with Level 10 Construction were already at work building out the space this week.
“The reality is, we probably opened 20 or 30 new locations last year, and we hire 300-400 people a month,” SolarCity spokesman Jonathan Bass told me. “In this particular case, the Silevo team is growing and need a larger space. We looked at a number of different buildings, this was available and suits our needs.”
The expansion is significant for publicly traded SolarCity, the nation’s largest solar company that sells, installs and leases solar systems. SolarCity is spending big bucks on Silevo’s manufacturing capability. That includes a massive plant under construction in Buffalo, New York, a potentially risky and capital-intense strategy to drive down the cost of panels and boost their efficiency. A large new R&D center in Fremont shows SolarCity is scaling up all aspects of the division.
Cloudy Skies?
SolarCity has had growing pains. More from the SV Business Journal:
SolarCity’s financial picture has been mixed. Revenue has been growing — to $58 million in the third quarter, up from $48 million a year earlier. Still, it saw a loss from operations of $74.3 million, and the company — whose chairman is SpaceX and Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk — has seen its share price slip 32 percent from its 2013 high.
The 2014 acquisition of Silevo, for $350 million, was a turning point for eight-year-old SolarCity. The company has traditionally used other firms’ photovoltaic panels in its installations, which it generally leases to customers. Churning out its own panels should allow
Yet as experts have noted, others have tried to do what SolarCity is now doing — and failed.
The Fremont deal may help in that regard. SolarCity’s Bass said the two-building complex will function as R&D and office space for Silevo, which employs about 60 employees locally today. The company expects to hire about 100 employees in Fremont for the division over the next year, he said.
While panels won’t be rolling off the line in Fremont, the expansion will assist SolarCity’s aggressive ambitions for manufacturing solar panels elsewhere. The goal is to take Silevo from 39 megawatts of panel capacity produced last year to 1 gigawatt in 2017.
New York State is spending $750 million into building a 1.2 million sq.ft. facility and supporting infrastructure at RiverBend, and purchasing the necessary equipment. SolarCity will lease the facility for ten years and over that period invest $5 billion into running the facility that is expected to open early next year and create 3,000 direct and spin-off jobs. It is the first of what is expected to be multiple production facilities around the United States.
SolarCity was founded by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive and backed by Elon Musk, who is also their cousin. The company employs about 9,000 people.