Tesla Gigafactory

[AlMc]

I've been following the Gigafactory for ages.. But can I ask a couple of naive questions?

First why does it have to be so big (and it has two stories as well!)? I get that there is a big demand, but surely they are processing and then shipping battery packs that a a fraction of size of cars, yet plant is bigger than NUMMI orboeings! Building 747s I can see requires a large space, but don't see the need here. Assuming that it is not a 'spruce goose' style ego trip, is there some undisclosed reason for its size?
Second, where are the raw materials coming from?. Again granted that lithium is a relatively small component of battery, but perhaps there are undisclosed reasons for size and location.

I've been through threads but haven't seen a full answer to these questions

I am not an expert but I will try to answer your questions:

1. Size: They are going to produce more batteries at this one site than the total current world output. They need them to produce in excess of 500,000 vehicles per year (2020) and for all the powerwalls and powerpacks for energy storage.

2. Suppliers of raw materials: To my knowledge they have not disclosed them. This is why you see some people doing speculative investing in lithium mines in North America.

 

[RobinF]

I've been following the Gigafactory for ages.. But can I ask a couple of naive questions?

First why does it have to be so big (and it has two stories as well!)? I get that there is a big demand, but surely they are processing and then shipping battery packs that a a fraction of size of cars, yet plant is bigger than NUMMI orboeings! Building 747s I can see requires a large space, but don't see the need here. Assuming that it is not a 'spruce goose' style ego trip, is there some undisclosed reason for its size?
Second, where are the raw materials coming from?. Again granted that lithium is a relatively small component of battery, but perhaps there are undisclosed reasons for size and location.

I've been through threads but haven't seen a full answer to these questions

The factory has to be sized to support the battery pack needs of 500,000 cars plus the home battery units. If you run the numbers, that mean processing raw materials, fabricating and testing at least 50 of these PER SECOND.

That will mean multiple production lines (~20?) full of very large machinery. They have to house both the dirty raw material processing, and aluminum pack stamping and titanium shield stamping, as well as the clean room battery fabrication, pack assembly, pack control electronics, etc. This is the ultimate in vertical integration cutting out supplier margins in order to get the unit cost down as far as possible. And ultimately this will only supply the American market. Next would be more of these puppies in Asia and Europe.

 

[chickensevil]

FYI, the rendering that you are referencing was actually created by my brother (ajax) in Photoshop back in January by overlaying a Gigafactory rendering from Tesla, a distorted construction site photo, and Google Earth satellite imagery, which he posted on the forums here: Tesla Gigafactory Investor Thread - Page 189. The proportions should be accurate as he used a pickup truck in another construction photo to determine beam spacing. Another forum member (chickensevil) added in the 5 sections that you see as his best guess as to the 5 phases of construction. Also, the bottom fifth (let's call it subsection 5) of section 1 is still not complete as I explained in a previous post: Tesla Gigafactory Investor Thread - Page 206. That section was actually cannibalized to finish the steel work on subsections 1 - 4 of section 1. This would indicate that the Gigafactory (not counting foundation) is actually 20% complete, not 25% as Elon stated. If you include the foundation, then it is 25% complete.

Wow... really? They took our photo? which was really just a best guess based on the information we had at the time... what the heck, man! And the only reason I care is because they are potentially making money off of something that we put together to brainstorm the factory construction... not to have some fund take it and use it for their own profit. Sigh.

 

[tinm]

Interesting video presentation by a guy from Story County, Nevada about how they're business-friendly. Interesting little details about Tesla's Gigafactory throughout the video. According to the speaker:

• Tesla needs to have phase 1 of Gigafactory open in March 2016; 300 workers initially, running 5 shifts.
• Panasonic bringing 14 other companies over from Japan, all related to Gigafactory project.
• There will be six restaurants on-site at the GF, including one with fresh sushi for all the Japanese workers.
• Tesla just recently bought another 1200 acres. They're expanding the scope of the land for the GF site significantly.
• If I heard this correctly, they anticipate the county growing from 4500 workers in the industrial park now, to 300,000 eventually. It's a bonanza for real estate.

Turns out there's another video continuing the Q&A from the session. More interesting details about Panasonic and Tesla vis a vis the GF:

• One interesting detail: Tesla's bringing in a 100KV line from one direction and a 120KV line from another direction so the GF has uninterruptible grid power. Gee and I thought the GF was going to run off solar and batteries?

 

[chickensevil]

• One interesting detail: Tesla's bringing in a 100KV line from one direction and a 120KV line from another direction so the GF has uninterruptible grid power. Gee and I thought the GF was going to run off solar and batteries?

Eventually, but it was stated as "net zero" not grid independent.

 

[pmadflyer]

I'm sure the factory won't start out with a full solar array and wind farm, but will need to run lighting and equipment from day one.

I would love it if they start flattening out a GF sized plot next to the current GF once the final phase is under construction. Imagine the headline, "Buyers Rush to Tesla Model 3; Second Factory Under Construction."

 

[MikeC]

Interesting video presentation by a guy from Story County, Nevada about how they're business-friendly. Interesting little details about Tesla's Gigafactory throughout the video. According to the speaker:

• Tesla needs to have phase 1 of Gigafactory open in March 2016; 300 workers initially, running 5 shifts.
• Panasonic bringing 14 other companies over from Japan, all related to Gigafactory project.
• There will be six restaurants on-site at the GF, including one with fresh sushi for all the Japanese workers.
• Tesla just recently bought another 1200 acres. They're expanding the scope of the land for the GF site significantly.
• If I heard this correctly, they anticipate the county growing from 4500 workers in the industrial park now, to 300,000 eventually. It's a bonanza for real estate.

Turns out there's another video continuing the Q&A from the session. More interesting details about Panasonic and Tesla vis a vis the GF:

• One interesting detail: Tesla's bringing in a 100KV line from one direction and a 120KV line from another direction so the GF has uninterruptible grid power. Gee and I thought the GF was going to run off solar and batteries?

Nice find.

At 6:49, he said they bought 1000 acres to start, bought 1200 acres last week, and are buying another 250 acres now.

Then at 16:15, he says superstructure Block 1 or A (first of seven) will be 2.5 million square feet, then they added "another floor 41", and then "another floor 23.5". I am not sure what units he is using for the last two numbers.

 

[chickensevil]

Nice find.

At 6:49, he said they bought 1000 acres to start, bought 1200 acres last week, and are buying another 250 acres now.

Then at 16:15, he says superstructure Block 1 or A (first of seven) will be 2.5 million square feet, then they added "another floor 41", and then "another floor 23.5". I am not sure what units he is using for the last two numbers.

He is talking about the height of the floors... Which is interesting... Essentially each floor is poured concrete with only the roof not needing to be perfectly flat. Likely there will be a lot of robotics in the factory to move stuff around and they need very precise measurements and level ground. The roof will be at 71ft and he said if Tesla ever builds the whole thing it will be 24 million square feet falling just short of Boeing only because Boeing has a 90 ft roof.

so let that sink in... We just went from a 10million square foot facility to a potential 24... If we assume linear sizing in capacity that should come out to roughly 84GWh of battery production a year!!!!!!! My. God. That is one big factory! That isn't a 50% increase... Not a 100% increase but a 150% increase in size. The implications here...

 

[Cosmacelf]

Wow, I wish all local government was run like this county seems to be run!

 

[hobbes]

so let that sink in... We just went from a 10million square foot facility to a potential 24... If we assume linear sizing in capacity that should come out to roughly 84GWh of battery production a year!!!!!!! My. God. That is one big factory! That isn't a 50% increase... Not a 100% increase but a 150% increase in size. The implications here...

There´s only two words to describe this: Reckless growth !

 

[scaesare]

. The roof will be at 71ft and he said if Tesla ever builds the whole thing it will be 24 million square feet falling just short of Boeing only because Boeing has a 90 ft roof.

Roof height doesn't affect floor square footage. Should that be 24 million cubic feet (a unit of volume, not surface area)?

 

[chickensevil]

Roof height doesn't affect floor square footage. Should that be 24 million cubic feet (a unit of volume, not surface area)?

Hrmmm, maybe you are right, which is why the comparison with Boeing is such that the only difference will be the height of the building... So extracting out the height of 71 inches gives a based floor of ~4M Square feet, which multiplied by 2 (as there is two floors) gives ~8M Square feet... So, no size change at all???

- - - Updated - - -

Wait, that then doesn't compute against the Boeing plant then which has a cubic volume of 472,370,319 cu ft spread across only 93 Acres. The land they own was like 900 acres and they just bought another 1200 and then another like 300 acres... So something is up here on the land sizing. Sounds to me based on the comments of the guy in the video that there must be something we are not getting right here with the numbers since the measurements aren't adding up.

 

[dhanson865]

Hrmmm, maybe you are right, which is why the comparison with Boeing is such that the only difference will be the height of the building... So extracting out the height of 71 inches gives a based floor of ~4M Square feet, which multiplied by 2 (as there is two floors) gives ~8M Square feet... So, no size change at all???

- - - Updated - - -

Wait, that then doesn't compute against the Boeing plant then which has a cubic volume of 472,370,319 cu ft spread across only 93 Acres. The land they own was like 900 acres and they just bought another 1200 and then another like 300 acres... So something is up here on the land sizing. Sounds to me based on the comments of the guy in the video that there must be something we are not getting right here with the numbers since the measurements aren't adding up.

The Boeing plant doesn't have a wind farm and solar farm. It could be the additional land is not just for factory size increase but also the associated power draw increase.

 

[dhanson865]

Interesting video presentation by a guy from Story County, Nevada about how they're business-friendly. Interesting little details about Tesla's Gigafactory throughout the video. According to the speaker:

• Tesla needs to have phase 1 of Gigafactory open in March 2016; 300 workers initially, running 5 shifts.
• Panasonic bringing 14 other companies over from Japan, all related to Gigafactory project.
• There will be six restaurants on-site at the GF, including one with fresh sushi for all the Japanese workers.
• Tesla just recently bought another 1200 acres. They're expanding the scope of the land for the GF site significantly.
• If I heard this correctly, they anticipate the county growing from 4500 workers in the industrial park now, to 300,000 eventually. It's a bonanza for real estate.

Turns out there's another video continuing the Q&A from the session. More interesting details about Panasonic and Tesla vis a vis the GF:

• One interesting detail: Tesla's bringing in a 100KV line from one direction and a 120KV line from another direction so the GF has uninterruptible grid power. Gee and I thought the GF was going to run off solar and batteries?

is the in between of those two, If you want to see them in order watch the 30 minute one first, the 5 minute one second, and the 16 minute one third.

He discusses the water / plumbing and floor heights in this section.

 

[pmadflyer]

From his floor comment:
Ground: 0 feet
Mezzanine (newly added from expansion): 23.5 feet
Floor Two: 41 feet
Roof: 71 feet

1.7 million (Elon/Kimbal Twitter/Instagram can't remember) sq ft. with original two floors.
(1.7/2)*3 = 2.55 million sq. ft. or "about two and a half million" as per the video.

Hold on. He said "they just built another 500 acre pad at 98% compaction."
That's 21.78 million square feet. That's big enough for GF 2!

 

[neroden]

• If I heard this correctly, they anticipate the county growing from 4500 workers in the industrial park now, to 300,000 eventually. It's a bonanza for real estate.

They're going to need to build public transportation (buses, passenger rail) if they have that many workers. Roads simply will not handle that many people coming into one small space all at the same time. Or even in three shifts. Actually, only rail can handle that kind of volume.

I doubt Elon has thought about that, though he should have. 19th century & early 20th century owners of really high-employment factories understood this.

I guess they could build dormitories instead, but public transportation makes more sense. Perhaps once the Gigafactory is rail-connected (as it most certainly needs to be for freight purposes) he could talk Union Pacific into running an employee shuttle train from the Reno train station for each shift. (It's a short enough route that it could even be battery-powered. )

Actually, if they haven't thought the public transportation through, they're going to have very, very serious problems. There is *no way* they can handle this size operation with everyone using private cars, and it'll probably overwhelm the capacity of buses.

 

[Krugerrand]

I doubt Elon has thought about that, though he should have.

Please. We're talking about the man who preplanned with the Gigafactory in the first place, and the Supercharger Network.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Also, the gigafactory looks like it is going to be highly automated. There will be fewer employees there than it might otherwise appear.

 

[chickensevil]

To clarify immediately after stating 300k employees said that he expected the real number to be much lower... Like 60k because of automation and the future of factory jobs. And this was for the entire complex not just Tesla.

also this is why he said they already put in USA Parkway as a four lane with plans for other exits and major roads to come through there to alleviate.

finally he said they are also working with each owner to schedule shift changes to not all happen at the same time. You are also looking at what is currently 3,500 people working out there across four shifts which means at any given moment you would have only ~750 employees either headed to work or heading home... Which is a much lower number and issue. Traffic problems stem from other issues like the trucking and such, and they even said they kicked Tesla construction off the main road because the concrete trucks were messing up the traffic flows.

it is fascinating to me to hear all the infrastructure comments from the guy and everything they have done and plan for in the future.

this guy should come over to DC and solve our traffic nightmare!

 

[quartzav]

@Tinm,
Kind of out-of topic. But another sushi restaurant? Seriously though IMHO the last thing Reno need is another Sushi all you can eat place...we are overrun with those places (over 30 of them in the area in 2013 per RGJ) There are a lot more than just Sushi and hibachi in Japanese culinary offering...:tongue: tsk...tsk that story county guy