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Elon Musk says that he wants SpaceX and Tesla teams to work together to build 100 gigawatts of solar power manufacturing capacity in the US — cells and modules. And he wants to do that within three years. There’s a lot to consider here.
Before we get into some of the nuts and bolts, big-picture view, Tesla is almost a decade behind schedule on what Musk said the company would achieve with self-driving cars, and SpaceX is years behind schedule on sending people to Mars. However, on the flip side, Tesla has built manufacturing facilities — in China and the US — much faster than skeptics assumed the company could.
Regarding these broad solar ambitions, pv magazine‘s Ben Zientara has gone through and evaluated how realistic they look. It’s a great piece, and I’m just going to highlight what I see as the key notes here:
Total solar module manufacturing in the US was probably just above 45 GW at the end of 2025, and is expected to rise to 60 GW in 2026. (This is on the back of huge investments in the industry stimulated by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 passed by Democrats and signed into law by Joe Biden.)
