What Buffalo Got, And Didn't Get, When Tesla Came To Town

After $750 million in subsidies and years of delays, critics say Elon Musk hasn’t done enough for his solar panel factory.

- Austin Carr & Brian Eckhouse

Just south of downtown Buffalo, near abandoned factories and crumbling brick warehouses, is a 1.2 million-square-foot white box housing Tesla Inc.’s solar panel factory. The state of New York paid $750 million to fund this place, based on a commitment to create almost 1,500 jobs here. On a Tuesday morning in mid-November, two dozen of these workers monitor several rows of robots working on the Solar Roof, a new kind of solar panel that Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is very excited about. Or was, anyway.

A Solar Roof is made of textured glass tiles with solar cells hidden inside. On the factory line in Buffalo, these shingles 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 from the company’s Bay Area offices. Wearing protective rubber shoes and a constant smile, Shah rebuts criticism that Tesla’s entrance into the solar business has been a boondoggle.

Tesla has presented the Buffalo operation as a sequel to the Gigafactory, its enormous battery plant near Reno, Nev. But where that factory employs more than 7,000 people and has helped Musk transform Tesla into a major automotive manufacturer, large portions of Gigafactory 2, as this place is known, resemble an empty Walmart Supercenter. Tesla was supposed to be operating multiple production lines. Only one is set up, and it’s not yet fully automated. A mess of wooden crates with unused manufacturing equipment sits nearby.