Dive Brief:
- Electric vehicle and battery storage technology company Tesla Motors has selected Nevada as the site for its much-hyped Gigafactory, according to sources close to the matter.
- The Gigafactory will be sited near Reno, Nevada, which is close to the company's vehicle assembly plant in Fremont, California.
- Nevada was chosen over Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, which made a late legislative push to win Tesla over.
Dive Insight:
When it reaches full capacity, the Gigafactory plant will produce 35 gigawatt-hours of lithium ion cells per year — more than the existing capacity of all batteries worldwide today.
Nevada was selected due to a number of reasons. A site selection analyst told the Wall Street Journal that the primary reason for the choice was the optionality of energy for the facility at the Nevada site. Reno can provide Tesla with solar, wind and geothermal to power the Gigafactory. Other factors include: an absence of income taxes in the state, its closeness to Tesla's Fremont plant, and the fact that Tesla had already done some preliminary work at the Nevada site.
If all goes according to Elon Musk's plans, the Gigafactory would not only produce battery packs to bring 500,000 Tesla vehicles on the road by 2020, but bring down the costs of battery storage, a technology considered vital to the integration of high penetrations of intermittent renewables, by at least 30% through its sheer scale and vertical integration.
