Blog Tesla Releases Environmental Impact Report

Tesla published on Monday its first ever Impact Report, a study of the impact the company’s products and operations have on the environment and communities.

“We believe the faster the world moves towards a zero-emission future, the better, so we’re working hard to minimize our greenhouse gas footprint, while investing in our employees and the communities in which we operate,” the company wrote on a webpage for the report.

Tesla said that the more than 550,000 vehicles it has sold to date have driven more than 10 billion miles, resulting in a combined savings of more than 4 million metric tons of CO2.

The company said its Supercharger network has delivered more than 595 Gigawatthours (GWhs) of energy, saving the equivalent of more than 75 million gallons of gasoline.

“That’s enough gasoline for the average ICE vehicle with a fuel economy of 22 MPG to travel round trip from Los Angeles to New York City over 290K times,” the report said.

As of February 2019, Tesla Energy has installed over 3.5 Gigawatts of solar installations and has cumulatively generated over 13 Terawatthours (TWhs) of 100% clean, emissions-free electricity, Tesla said.

“To put 13 TWhsin perspective, this amount of energy could supply the annual residential electricity consumption for the entire state of Connecticut,” the report said. “Over their entire expected use life of 35+ years, these solar installations are expected to generate 86.5 TWh of energy, which is enough electricity to power all of Washington D.C. for almost a decade.”

See the full report here.

 

[Electric700]

This is really good news! I encourage Tesla to continue toward the goal of making all of their operations 100% solar and wind powered, including for Superchargers.

 

[tiggerlu]

Fantastic, and confirms what deep down inside all of us Tesla adopters think and feel about changing the world.

Just imagine, if there was political willpower behind not only Tesla but clean-energy innovations -- we can't imagine "better" until it's here.

Those days when people said second-hand cigarette smoke had no effect on health, and one day we'll say the same thing about car exhaust.

 

[Koch Killer]

And what can't be so easily quantified or attributed is the most important achievement of Tesla of all- bringing down the cost of battery technology and the actual cars, so that EVs become not only viable but actually market dominant. Also, innovating the cost-effective battery tech that will solve the intermittency issue.

 

[Skryll]

I found it interesting that they mention the patents, but not the offer from 2014 to onboard other car companies electric vehicles onto the supercharger network as long as they can take the full charge speed and contribute to the buildout. Tragic that VW billions of diesel gate fines were not spent on expanding the supercharger network with some anti-monopolistic rules around it, but instead are being wasted on a mediocre ElectrifyAmerica buildout competing which is weakening the quality and fragmenting the choices consumers have.

In that light I am happy that at least in Europe FCA pays several hundreds of millions to tesla for pooling their dirty fleet with teslas instead of giving it as a fine to the government which would probably be misused the same way as VW's dieselgate fine in the US.

 

[Ibertag]

I bet the battery production environment footprint isn’t included in that fantastic looking statistic. Would like to believe we are already at that point electric vehicles could help decrease negative environmental influence of the mobility sector, but while lithium is in use I don’t think they have a real chance.

 

[Eclectic]

That report was full of lots of statements without any supporting evidence.