New York state spent $950 million in the past decade on Elon Musk's plan to create a huge solar-panel factory in Buffalo that was meant to create thousands of high-paid high-tech jobs, but the project has floundered, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The state, then run by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, paid to build a quarter-mile-long facility with 1.2 million square feet of industrial space that it leases to Musk's Tesla Inc. for $1 a year, in return for a commitment to stay until 2029. It bought $240 million worth of solar-panel manufacturing equipment with Musk predicting in 2015 that by 2020, it would be making enough panels to cover 1,000 roofs. Instead, the unit is averaging just 21 installations a week, said the report, citing analysts at Wood Mackenzie. The building houses some factory workers, but also hundreds of less well-paid data analysts working on Tesla's (TSLA) self-driving tech and other business. The suppliers Cuomo was expecting to flock to the hub never showed up and the state has sold the solar-panel equipment at a discount or scrapped it. An audit found just 54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent. External auditors have written down almost the entire New York investment. For more, click here.
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