{"id":9379,"date":"2014-06-18T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T16:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=9379"},"modified":"2014-06-18T12:20:37","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T16:20:37","slug":"thousands-of-solar-jobs-a-thousand-miles-north-of-here-solarcity-buys-silevo-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/thousands-of-solar-jobs-a-thousand-miles-north-of-here-solarcity-buys-silevo-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Thousands of solar jobs a thousand miles north of here: SolarCity buys Silevo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nAn Economic Development Council in snowy Buffalo has\r\nlanded a solar manufacturer with suddenly even deeper pockets,\r\nwhile our Industrial Authority didn’t even meet this month.\r\nMaybe instead of supporting an unnecessary fracked methane\r\npipeline that diverts resources we could get on with\r\nreal solar industry here in sunny south Georgia?\r\n

\r\nWIVB.com wrote yesterday,\r\n\r\nPurchase of company coming to Buffalo could be boon for WNY<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n\r\nSilevo<\/a>, a company that had planned to set up shop at Buffalo’s\r\nRiverbend site, has been bought out by SolarCity, and the plan could\r\nmean thousands of jobs for Western New York.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nSilevo is a solar panel technology and manufacturing company that\r\nhad been planning on bringing around 500 jobs to Buffalo. Silevo had\r\nplanned to invest $750 million to create a production facility at\r\nRiverbend, which is being built by the state to be a\r\nstate-of-the-art campus to house high-tech and advanced\r\nmanufacturing companies.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n\r\nSolarCity<\/a>, a $6 billion company, confirmed Tuesday it had purchased\r\nthe smaller Silevo and is now in discussions with New York State to\r\nbuild an initial manufacturing plant at Riverbend. The project would\r\ncreate one of the single largest solar panel production plants in\r\nthe world and could mean thousands of jobs for Western New York.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n\r\nWNY Regional Economic Development Council<\/a> member\r\n\r\nHarold Zemsky<\/a> said,\r\n

\r\n“We went from being partners with a private, small emerging\r\ntechnology company to being partners with a $6 billion company\r\nthat’s one of the leading green energy companies in the\r\nworld.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nMeanwhile,\r\n\r\nour VLCIA<\/a>, receiving 1 mil or about $2.5 million of our property taxes \r\na year:\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority’s Regular monthly\r\nmeeting scheduled for Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 5:30 pm at the\r\nIndustrial Authority Conference Room, 2110 N. Patterson Street has\r\nbeen cancelled.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\nVLCIA did also post that cancellation notice\r\non their facebook page 20 hours ago<\/a>.\r\nThe one time I didn’t check in advance and went down there anyway,\r\n<\/a>\r\nI did discover that their July meeting will be in\r\n\r\ntheir new office near the hospital<\/a>\r\nthey bought last October<\/a>.\r\nI guess those Industrial Parks they’re always bragging about\r\nweren’t good enough to locate their own office in.\r\nAnd probably new office space was higher priority than\r\nlanding a solar manufacturer.\r\n

\r\nWhile most of the world fiddles, SolarCity is getting on with the future.\r\nAs Elon Musk, Peter Rive and Lyndon Rive wrote for SolarCity Blog 17 June 2014,\r\n\r\nSolar at Scale<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n\"300x307<\/a>\r\nSolarCity was founded to accelerate mass adoption of sustainable\r\nenergy. The sun, that highly convenient and free fusion reactor in\r\nthe sky, radiates more energy to the Earth in a few hours than the\r\nentire human population consumes from all sources in a year. This\r\nmeans that solar panels, paired with batteries to enable power at\r\nnight, can produce several orders of magnitude more electricity than\r\nis consumed by the entirety of human civilization. A cogent\r\nassessment of sustainable energy potential from various sources is\r\ndescribed well in this Sandia paper:\r\n\r\nwww.sandia.gov\/~jytsao\/Solar%20FAQs.pdf<\/a>.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nEven if the solar industry were only to generate 40 percent of the\r\nworld’s electricity with photovoltaics by 2040, that would mean\r\ninstalling more than 400 GW of solar capacity per year for the next\r\n25 years. We absolutely believe that solar power can and will become\r\nthe world’s predominant source of energy within our lifetimes, but\r\nthere are obviously a lot<\/strong>\r\nof panels that have to be manufactured and\r\ninstalled in order for that to happen. The plans we are announcing\r\ntoday, while substantial compared to current industry, are small in\r\nthat context.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nHear that, Southern Company and Georgia Power?\r\nKeep up only a few slight changes<\/a>\r\nto slowly ramp up to one gigawatt in a few years,\r\nand\r\nyou’ll end up getting bought by SolarCity, not the other way around.\r\nFor all our sakes let’s hope one of the storage projects SO CEO\r\nTom Fanning said they were involved in is the SolarCity superbattery\r\nproject.\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nAnd as for that \r\nfracked methane pipeline<\/a>\r\nand\r\n\r\nVLCIA’s support for it<\/a>:\r\n

\r\n

\r\n“We’ll give them permission,” Schruijer said. “Why\r\nwouldn’t we?”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nWell, maybe because supporting that unnecessary pipeline\r\nis enabling diversion of resources from getting on with solar power?\r\nMaybe because\r\n\r\ninviting toxic industries into your county<\/a>\r\nis not a good way to promote economic growth?\r\n

\r\nI look forward to getting real solar industry here in sunny south Georgia.\r\n

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1073,14,18,6687,24,178],"tags":[8814,8704,8701,8708,8702,12,7,8819,6076,7726,8714,8812,108,6,8749],"class_list":["post-9379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buffalo","category-economy","category-georgia-power","category-pipeline-2","category-solar","category-vlcia","tag-buffalo","tag-economy","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-new-york","tag-pipeline","tag-silevo","tag-solar","tag-solarcity","tag-southern-company","tag-valdosta","tag-vlcia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-2rh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9379"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9390,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9379\/revisions\/9390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}