Tesla and SolarCity might both be building what they’re calling “gigafactories” — huge, industry-disrupting manufacturing plants — but the strategies employed by each company actually have different degrees of risk involved and different goals. Tesla’s is far more audacious in size, but SolarCity is trying to scale up a new technology, and the world is littered with failed companies that tried to scale new manufacturing tech on a certain timeline and for a certain budget.

Earlier this week New York Governor Andrew Cuomo traveled upstate to the city of Buffalo to attend an official “ground-breaking” for SolarCity’s planned massive solar panel factory there. When, and if, completed the factory will be one of the largest solar panel manufacturing plants of its kind outside of Asia, with enough capacity to eventually make 1 GW worth of solar panels per year. For comparison’s sake, there’s just a little over 15 GW of…