Elon Musk, the founder of the electric car manufacturer Tesla, has plans to build one of the world’s largest solar panel factories in Buffalo.

Musk is chairman and the largest individual shareholder of SolarCity, which yesterday acquired Silevo, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has a factory in China. The deal is worth $200 million, but can be worth as much as $350 million.

Silevo had previously agreed to build a solar panel factory in Buffalo as part of a $1.6 billion economic development project in partnership with Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Musk says he’s moving forward with plans for the factory, which are also confirmed in regulatory documents filed with the SEC as part of the merger.

However, Musk has plans for a much larger solar panel factory than originally planned. Silevo was planning a 200-megawatt factory, while Musk and SolarCity are planning a 1 gigawatt factory that has five times the output, making it one of the largest in the world.

A 1 gigawatt solar panel factory would produce enough panels every year to produce 1 gigawatts of electrical output, which is enough to power about 220,000 homes.

To understand just how large a factory this would be, General Electric Co. was considering building a 400 megawatt solar factory a few years ago that would have been the largest in the country at the time. GE later abandoned the plan.

A Japanese company called Solar Frontier operates a 900 megawatt solar panel factory in Japan, but that company has been moving toward smaller facilities. Ironically, Solar Frontier is contemplating building a $750 million, 150 megawatt factory in Buffalo as well as part of the research partnership with the NanoCollege.

However, there is a move in Europe to build a gigawatt solar factory by a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy System in Germany, the National Solar Energy Institute in France and the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology. The top-secret initiative, expected to cost at least $1.3 billion, is called the xGWp European Gigawatt Fab.

Tuesday afternoon, Cuomo’s office issued a press release about SolarCity’s new plans, without naming the company.

“Today, a global leader in clean energy manufacturing announced potential plans to build one of the world’s largest solar panel production plants at Buffalo’s Riverbend site, where the abandoned Republic Steel Mill is being transformed by the Buffalo Billion,” Cuomo says in the statement.

The Buffalo Billion is a term that the governor uses for his plan to pump $1 billion into the city for economic development.

SolarCity does not currently make its own solar cells, so acquiring Silevo is a huge leap into manufacturing and owning the technology. Silevo’s solar cells are a hybrid between traditional crystalline silicon cell and thin-film technologies.

The company has a regional operations center in Albany off of Central Avenue in Vatrano Park.

Silevo has said it expects to get 24 percent efficiency out of its mass-produced solar cells in coming years, which is much higher than traditional solar cells can produce.

SolarCity, which lost $75 million during the first quarter of the year, was founded in 2006 by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive, South African’s by birth who ran a company called Everdream that was sold to computer giant Dell in 2007.

Musk, a cousin to the Rives, was the founder of PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002. Musk is also South African by birth.

The deal includes an agreement with the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany that has been touted by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to boost the economy of Buffalo.

Shares of SolarCity have surged 14 percent Tuesday to $62.90 a share.

Musk has seen the connection between batteries, electric cars and solar for a while now. Tesla has plans to provide back-up batteries to solar customers, and there are also expectations that electric cars will one day provide excess power to the grid during the night when solar panels aren’t collecting sun.

SolarCity also installs some of Tesla’s “superchargers,” which are electric charging stations for Tesla vehicles. SolarCity also often installs solar panels used to power the stations. There is a Tesla supercharger station installed at Colonie Center on Wolf Road in Colonie.

On Monday, the same day that SolarCity inked its deal to purchase Silevo, Gov. Cuomo signed a bill that will save Tesla’s dealerships in the state, which had been under attack by New York’s auto dealers since they are owned by the company and not franchises.

The deal will also allow Tesla to open new retail locations in the state.

“New York’s franchised auto dealers and manufacturers as well as innovative companies like Tesla are critical to our state’s economy, and this bill ensures that both sides will thrive and be able to grow the market for cutting edge zero emission vehicles,” Cuomo said in a statement released Monday.