Tesla Gigafactory will be the second largest building in the world

Fast Company has interviewed the head of Tesla, Ilon Mask, in which the author was able to visit the battery factory under construction in Nevada, known as the Gigafactory . Although there is only one photograph of the building under construction, the journalist learned a lot of details about the project: by 2020, when the construction is completed, the factory building will be only slightly smaller than the Boeing assembly shop in Everett (Washington), which has a record world volume of 13.3 million m ³ . However, this is not all - Musk is not going to stop there and promised the journalist that "the factory will blow his brain." “You will see and understand how incredible it is,” he remarked.

The published Tesla Gig Factory photo is exclusive (full-size photo can be seen here ). So far, not a single journalist has officially visited the construction, although quite a lot of people show interest in it. In October this year, a photographer from a local newspaper was arrested after he managed to infiltrate the territory and fight with the guards who intended to take him out.

Construction takes place near the city of Reno. Now the finished building covers an area of ​​0.18 km ² , but in the future according to the project it will consist of 4 separate blocks, each of which will be on its own foundation, so that in case of a possible earthquake the building would not be completely destroyed. The area of ​​the finished gigafactory will be 1.3km ², and 6500 employees will be able to work on it. The volume of investment in construction amounted to $ 5 billion.

Mask's plans for a gigafactory are no less enormous. He gives such examples, describing the possible scale of production. If residents of Boulder, Colorado, who number 103,000, purchase 10,000 Powerpack batteries (an industrial version of the $ 25,000 Powerwall battery) and connect them to solar panels, they can completely abandon the usual way to get electricity. A similar trick across America would require 160 million Powerpacks.

Moreover, 900 million Powerpack batteries will completely abandon thermal power generation on the entire planet and radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. If you go a step further and imagine that 2 billion Tesla batteries will operate in the world, you can forget about the use of petroleum products and gas, including for cooking. At first, this number - 2 billion - seems huge, but, as Elon Musk observes, now 2 billion cars are used in the world and this park will be completely updated in 20 years. So there should be plenty of space for both Powerpack and solar panels.