SolarCity Unveils Industry’s Most Efficient Solar Panel

The company, headed by Elon Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive, has grown quickly since its founding in 2006.

The White House agrees: Last month the Obama administration introduced a new initiative to improve access to solar power across the country.

“We’re building the world’s most efficient rooftop solar panel in the United States”, said company spokesman Jonathan Bass.

SolarCity’s panel was measured with 22.04% module-level efficiency by Renewable Energy Test Center, a third-party certification testing provider for photovoltaic and renewable energy products. The company is now focused not only on installing solar panels, but also spending on innovating in the field. That’s slightly higher than the 21.5 percent efficiency boasted by rival SunPower’s X-Series solar panels.

Despite the encouraging results from the pilot plant, manufacturing any new solar technology is a huge risk; scaling up the production processes quickly and doing so while maintaining the efficiencies of the modules and without increasing costs could be hard.

The $900 million Buffalo factory, going up on the former Republic Steel site, will span 1.2 million square feet and have the capacity to produce between 9,000 and 10,000 solar panels each day, once it reaches full production sometime in early 2017. At the end of 2016, the federal tax credit for solar power is due to drop from 30 percent to 10 percent for businesses and to disappear altogether for consumers who buy their own solar panels.

“SolarCity’s achievement of a 22% efficient panel is significant, but even more valuable is their claim of producing 30%-40% more electricity than a standard panel at the same size”, Ogden added.

“That was a claim that had previously been monopolized by thin-film modules, like those produced by First Solar and SolarFrontier”, Ogden said. Though the results are impressive, the announcement also raises questions about whether SolarCity can successfully transition from being a solar panel installer to a manufacturer, especially one making a radically new type of solar technology.