(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Just south of downtown Buffalo, near abandoned factories and crumbling brick warehouses, is a 1.2-million-square-foot white box with Tesla Inc.’s solar panel factory inside. The state of New York paid $750 million to fund this place, based on a commitment to create nearly 1,500 jobs here. On a Tuesday morning in mid-November, a group of two dozen of these workers is monitoring several rows of robots that are stamping out materials for the Solar Roof, a new kind of solar panel that Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is very excited about. Or was, anyway.
The Solar Roof is designed to look and act like regular house shingles, but Tesla’s are textured glass with solar cells hidden inside. On the factory line in Buffalo, these glass tiles slide on a conveyor belt toward a gigantic laminator, where components are heated and vacuumed together into a single module, a “solar sandwich,” as employees call it.
“By the time we’re done, this factory will not have much floor space,” says Sanjay Shah, who oversees solar for Musk as Tesla’s head of energy operations and is based at the company’s Bay Area offices. Wearing protective rubber shoes and a constant smile, Shah gives reporters from Bloomberg Businessweek a tour of the Tesla production line, which until then had been closed to the media. He also rebuts criticism from investors and local politicians who’ve said Tesla’s entrance into the solar business has been a boondoggle.
