It’s a timeless story: Startup Hotshot lures a careless politician into pouring tons of cash into a potential establishment to revive a once-proud manufacturing town. Today’s startup, Tesla; Politicians, Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been disgraced; and town, Buffalo. The New York Gigafactory, as the name suggests, was once tapped to produce enough rooftop solar panels for 1,000 homes a week and created 3,000 jobs, 900 of which were locations. manufacture.
Six years since opening, average weekly output has reached nearly 21 roofs, and more than 40 percent of employees at the Buffalo facility analyze Autopilot and Fully self-driving data. What happened?
The Wall Street Journal full story, and it’s worth reading. New York poured almost $1 billion into the facility before April 2017, at the time solar city — the shingle maker that Musk sits on, which was partly owned and later merged into Tesla — is $3 billion in debt. Today, Tesla employs 1,700 on-site workers, something the company had to do to avoid $41 million in annual fines from the state. Again, many of them don’t work on a solar panel production line. polite WSJ:
In Buffalo, the state spent cash to build the factory, rather than offering tax breaks that lasted for years. Cuomo, a Democrat, sees that as the heart of what he calls the “Billionaire Bull”.
EJ McMahon, a founding senior fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative financial think-tank, said: “When building and equipping the Tesla solar panel plant, the state The state became a direct investor in that project on the worst possible terms. “In terms of the absolute direct cost to taxpayers, this could rank as the biggest economic development scam in American history.”
Instead of the high-tech factory workers the state intended, the more than 700 people working at the site are data analysts who look at “real-time driving data for AI training.” for Tesla’s autonomous vehicle software, the company reported to the state in February. Others assemble components for vehicle charging stations and backup switches for battery systems. “Tesla continues to produce Solar Roofs,” Tesla reported on the solar roofing product, but it did not provide specifics.
A spokesman for Empire State Development, the state agency that oversees subsidies, does not track what is being made at the Tesla factory or anywhere else the state has supported, said spokesman Pamm Lent. said.
Tesla’s agreement with the state requires it to stay at the factory, at a salary of $1 a year, until 2029.
The timeline starts with the big numbers: up to 10 gigawatts of electricity from a 5,000-person workforce. Not only was the goal never reached, but the goals have only dwindled in the years since. Buffalo even established a training facility to prepare graduates specifically for these local jobs. They are about to leave school – only, to work somewhere else:
To prepare for the arrival of Tesla and a wave of jobs in the solar manufacturing sector, Buffalo built a $44 million training center in the economically struggling East Side of California. city. The center’s CEO said that the training center has graduated about 500 people after four years of operation and has sent about 20 people to work at Tesla, most of which are equipment maintenance technicians.
Thirteen students graduated from a separate solar production training program started by Buffalo’s public schools. A spokesman would not say how many of them have been hired by Tesla.
It would be a disadvantage to spoil any more disappointingly fun challenges, although I’ll leave you with a statement for magazine On behalf of Cuomo:
A spokesman for the former governor has defended the project, saying that the factory site now has more jobs than when it was a vacant lot that used to be a steel mill.
Read the rest at The Wall Street Journal.
