By Eric Wesoff | Greentech Media
The yet unnamed location of Elon Musk’s outrageously ambitious $5 billion Tesla battery factory has been narrowed down to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico or Nevada for a while now. Construction potentially starts this year.
Electric vehicle pioneer Tesla Motors has suggested it will be building 500,000 cars per year by 2020 and hitting a scale that will drive down the cost of its 60 kilowatt-hour battery-pack by 30 percent to about $10,000. The project aims to disrupt battery costs enough to impact the distributed storage industry.
Tesla’s Giga factory will sprawl across 500 to 1000 acres of land situated near highways and rail, with space for a few hundred megawatts of solar panels and some wind turbines.
The state that wins the factory gets billions in direct investment as well as a potential 6,500 jobs. Politicians in these states are looking to attract the world’s largest lithium-ion battery factory with the only tools at their disposal: tax payer money and promises.
Luring Tesla with state incentives at secret meetings:
