Posted on 07/08/2023 7:12:25 AM PDT by Brilliant
New York spent nearly $1 billion over the past decade on Elon Musk’s ambitious plan for what was supposed to be the largest solar-panel factory in the Western Hemisphere, one of the largest-ever public cash outlays of its kind.
“You almost have to pinch yourself, right?” New York’s then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a construction ceremony for the factory in 2015. “That this is too good to be true.” Eight years later, that looks like a pretty good assessment.
New York state paid to build a quarter-mile-long facility with 1.2 million square feet of industrial space, which it now owns and leases to Tesla for $1 a year. It bought $240 million worth of solar-panel manufacturing equipment. Musk had said that by 2020 the Buffalo plant each week would churn out enough solar-panel shingles to cover 1,000 roofs.
The Tesla solar-energy unit behind the plan… is averaging just 21 installations a week, according to energy analysts at Wood Mackenzie who reviewed utility data. The building houses some factory workers, but also hundreds of lower-paid desk-bound data analysts working on other Tesla business.
The suppliers that Cuomo predicted would flock to a modern manufacturing hub never showed up. The only new nearby business is a Tim Horton’s coffee shop. Most of the solar-panel manufacturing equipment bought by the state has been sold at a discount or scrapped.
A state comptroller’s audit found just 54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent on the factory, which rose on the site of an old steel mill. External auditors have written down nearly all of New York’s investment.
“It was a bad deal,” said state Sen. Sean Ryan, a Democrat who represents Buffalo. “A cautionary tale is you can’t give governors too much power to get on the phone with egotistical billionaires.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Like, nothing else funded by NY taxpayers ever went bust...
For example, NYC...
Suckers
Why would anyone do business in New York?
This was bound to fail...because it’s being controlled and run by corruptocrats, not legitimate business interests.
When the Tesla factory in Texas is finished it will have 70,000 solar panels on the roof. That will produce about 25 Megawatts of power. The letters that spell Tesla are 500 feet tall. It’s a really big roof.
I know the Tesla Austin factory is the largest in the country (if not the world). But 500 feet tall letters? That really puts the scale into a whole other category than just large!
Sweden embraces nuclear energy
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4166403/posts
Socialists support nuclear. Commies want solar : )
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