People sometimes compare Elon Musk to Henry Ford, who revolutionized the automotive industry by introducing a conveyor assembly system.
SolarCity is a new breakthrough project by Elon Musk, which consists in the manufacture and mass distribution of solar panels as environmentally friendly sources of electricity.
Combining Business and Technology
Simply inventing a new technology is not enough. It is also important to attract manufacturers and customers who will use the innovative solution.
- The secret of Thomas Edison’s success lay in his excellent marketing and entrepreneurial skills. That is why dozens of his inventions have become commercially successful.
- Thousands of promising inventions have failed just because their creators lacked commercial talents.
- There are many brilliant inventors whose names are unknown. The reason for this is that successful merchants buy patents on breakthrough products at low prices, give them names, and then grow rich on them.
Elon Musk is very lucky to have both engineering and commercial talents. The SolarCity project is the result of combining his breakthrough idea and excellent marketing strategy.
How to Make Solar Panels Publicly Available
Elon Musk’s company offered everyone to lease solar panels instead of buying them. If customers want to install solar panels on the roofs of their houses, they can pay for them in installments for several years.
People will be able to get free electricity from the sun and gradually pay rent with the money saved.
There is another important commercial innovation that makes Elon Musk’s solar panels more competitive in the market. SolarCity has organized a complete closed production cycle at its factories and excluded intermediary chains of third-party suppliers.
SolarCity’s commercial offer is aimed at the end customer, and it is well known that trade margins lead to a significant increase in the cost of products for clients.
Although SolarCity is relatively new on the market, about $6 billion has already been invested in it. According to the company’s administration, SolarCity creates about five hundred new jobs every month, thereby helping to solve the employment problem in the United States.
Another impressive point is the rapid growth of customers, due to the maximum convenience of the terms of the deal on the lease of solar panels and buffer batteries.
The number of customers increases by more than 12,000 every month, and the total number of SolarCity partners already exceeds 250,000 people.
In previous years, the cost of a set of solar panels ranged from $30,000 to $50,000. Many could not afford it, given that the fees were charged at the same time, and the return on investment could only be expected after many years.
Some experts believe that innovative integrated production, the exclusion of intermediaries, and the use of leasing will cause unprecedented growth in the development of solar clean energy.