Tesla Gigafactory is Tesla’s giant lithium-ion battery plant under construction in Nevada, United States. Its cost is about 5 billion dollars which Tesla and its partner Panasonic are investing. It will be the Biggest building in the world once completed.
Elon Musk says, It will produce batteries for half million cars a year. As Tesla is aimed at manufacturing economic class Tesla Model 3 and extend its model 3 to various parts of the world like India, it will require huge number of batteries to meet the demand.
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• The factory stretches for about 126 acres i.e. about 5.5 million square feet. That will be 30 times the size of US Capitol building, 86 times the football ground size and larger than the Vatican City.
• As said by Elon Musk, the GIGA FACTORY when its complete will have the Biggest footprint of any building in the world. Summing up all levels, it could be as much as 15 million square feet which is 4 times the floor space of Burj Khalifa. Taking 5 people per square meter counting complete floor space, you can fit as many as 7.5 million people inside Tesla GIGA FACTORY which means you can fit one third of Australia’s population and combined population of Los Angeles and Chicago inside GIGA FACTORY.
• GIGA FACTORY will be using 100 percent sustainable energy through a combination of a 70 MW solar rooftop array and solar ground installations. It will make Tesla’s solar rooftop array 7 times larger than the largest rooftop solar system ever installed.
Some attention grabbing facts about GIGA FACTORY are:
• GIGA FACTORY will be a sustainable zero emission factory. Also by efficiently recirculating 1.5 million litres of water, it is planning to achieve 80 percent reduction in fresh water usage.
• It is shaped like a diamond which makes it aesthetically pleasing.
• Tesla spent an estimated 16 million dollars on the factory’s foundation which can withstand Earthquakes.
• This planet requires 100 such Giga factories to achieve 100 percent sustainable energy.
Hope Tesla will continue the same pace towards sustainability and other big companies to join the list…
Civil Scholar is a Blog by Aravind Samala on Construction, Environment, Technology, Trends and Innovation.