An Economic Development Council in snowy Buffalo has
landed a solar manufacturer with suddenly even deeper pockets,
while our Industrial Authority didn’t even meet this month.
Maybe instead of supporting an unnecessary fracked methane
pipeline that diverts resources we could get on with
real solar industry here in sunny south Georgia?

WIVB.com wrote yesterday,

Purchase of company coming to Buffalo could be boon for WNY,

Silevo, a company that had planned to set up shop at Buffalo’s
Riverbend site, has been bought out by SolarCity, and the plan could
mean thousands of jobs for Western New York.

Silevo is a solar panel technology and manufacturing company that
had been planning on bringing around 500 jobs to Buffalo. Silevo had
planned to invest $750 million to create a production facility at
Riverbend, which is being built by the state to be a
state-of-the-art campus to house high-tech and advanced
manufacturing companies.

SolarCity, a $6 billion company, confirmed Tuesday it had purchased
the smaller Silevo and is now in discussions with New York State to
build an initial manufacturing plant at Riverbend. The project would
create one of the single largest solar panel production plants in
the world and could mean thousands of jobs for Western New York.

WNY Regional Economic Development Council member

Harold Zemsky said,

“We went from being partners with a private, small emerging
technology company to being partners with a $6 billion company
that’s one of the leading green energy companies in the
world.”

Meanwhile,

our VLCIA, receiving 1 mil or about $2.5 million of our property taxes
a year:

The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority’s Regular monthly
meeting scheduled for Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 5:30 pm at the
Industrial Authority Conference Room, 2110 N. Patterson Street has
been cancelled.

VLCIA did also post that cancellation notice
on their facebook page 20 hours ago.
The one time I didn’t check in advance and went down there anyway,

I did discover that their July meeting will be in

their new office near the hospital
they bought last October.
I guess those Industrial Parks they’re always bragging about
weren’t good enough to locate their own office in.
And probably new office space was higher priority than
landing a solar manufacturer.

While most of the world fiddles, SolarCity is getting on with the future.
As Elon Musk, Peter Rive and Lyndon Rive wrote for SolarCity Blog 17 June 2014,

Solar at Scale,

SolarCity was founded to accelerate mass adoption of sustainable
energy. The sun, that highly convenient and free fusion reactor in
the sky, radiates more energy to the Earth in a few hours than the
entire human population consumes from all sources in a year. This
means that solar panels, paired with batteries to enable power at
night, can produce several orders of magnitude more electricity than
is consumed by the entirety of human civilization. A cogent
assessment of sustainable energy potential from various sources is
described well in this Sandia paper:

www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf.

Even if the solar industry were only to generate 40 percent of the
world’s electricity with photovoltaics by 2040, that would mean
installing more than 400 GW of solar capacity per year for the next
25 years. We absolutely believe that solar power can and will become
the world’s predominant source of energy within our lifetimes, but
there are obviously a lot
of panels that have to be manufactured and
installed in order for that to happen. The plans we are announcing
today, while substantial compared to current industry, are small in
that context.

Hear that, Southern Company and Georgia Power?
Keep up only a few slight changes
to slowly ramp up to one gigawatt in a few years,
and
you’ll end up getting bought by SolarCity, not the other way around.
For all our sakes let’s hope one of the storage projects SO CEO
Tom Fanning said they were involved in is the SolarCity superbattery
project.

And as for that
fracked methane pipeline
and

VLCIA’s support for it:

“We’ll give them permission,” Schruijer said. “Why
wouldn’t we?”

Well, maybe because supporting that unnecessary pipeline
is enabling diversion of resources from getting on with solar power?
Maybe because

inviting toxic industries into your county
is not a good way to promote economic growth?

I look forward to getting real solar industry here in sunny south Georgia.

-jsq