Tesla will be holding a “company talk” in April from its Giga New York location where the company manufactures its Solarglass Roof tile and energy products from. Elon Musk took to Twitter on Monday to share initial details about the upcoming Gigafactory New York event, noting that there will also be factory tours for customers and the media.
News of Tesla’s April company talk comes on the heels of a series of tweets by Musk that revealed the ramping up of solar tile roof installations in the San Francisco Bay area and eventual plans to roll out Tesla solar products to Europe and China.
Tesla April company talk will be from our Giga New York factory, where we make SolarGlass & several other products. Will also offer customer & media tours.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2020
The month of April happens to be the same timeframe as Tesla “Battery Day” which Elon Musk mentioned during the recent earnings call.
“…we’re going to talk about this in Battery Day, which is probably April. And then a lot of these questions will be answered. I think it’s going to be a very compelling story that we have to present. I think it’s going to actually blow people’s minds. It blows my mind, and I know it. So it’s going to be pretty cool,” Musk said.
Tesla produces it’s solar roof tiles, branded as Solarglass Roof, at the Buffalo, New York factory. The Solarglass looks like a contemporary roof tile but with nearly indestructible properties and acts “alive” by generating power through the sun. Tesla’s third-generation Solar Glass roof tile is simpler and faster to install than previous iterations. The company has a goal to manufacture approximately 1000 solar roofs per week, and will focus customer installations on California before expanding to the rest of the United States and eventually to overseas markets.
I was pleasantly surprised by my recent visit to the Tesla plant. It was encouraging to see Solar roofs, batteries, and charging stations being built in the facility. Tesla reports over 1100 workers at the plant and they say they will hit 1460 by the April deadline. pic.twitter.com/33aSuRdQLC
— Assemblyman Sean Ryan (@SeanMRyan149) February 8, 2020
A recent interview with New York Assembly member Sean Ryan with WBEN hinted that Tesla has also been producing batteries at Giga New York aside from its solar roofs and charging stations. Tesla has been tight-lipped about the production in the Buffalo facility but Ryan was pleased when he toured the factory last Friday.
“The factory is built out. It has complete lines running, product moving around, people are there, so it’s really transformed itself into what we’ve been hoping for. We’ve been holding our breath since we put that big bet down on Tesla. They had a slow start, and I was worried as we’re approaching this spring they were going to hit their deadlines, but they’re right on track,” he said.
Tesla has also reportedly been hiring hundreds of employees for its Buffalo facility in a bid to ramp up production at Giga New York and increase focus on its solar business. The company deployed 54 MW in the last quarter of 2019 or about a 25 percent jump from Q3’s 43 MW deployment. Tesla is looking to deploy at least 260 MW of solar energy systems this year, or a 50 percent increase over the 173 MW systems deployed in 2019.