Tesla to announce location for new factory around end of year, but where?
Tesla is “probably” going to announce a location for a new factory around the end of the year, says CEO Elon Musk.
Where could it end up?
Tesla already announced a new factory in Mexico just a few months ago, but we knew it wouldn’t be long before a new factory location was revealed.
That’s because Tesla plans to build 20 million vehicles per year by the end of the decade.
Considering Tesla’s currently built or announced factories are expected to be limited to about 6 million vehicles, we knew the automaker had to start work on a couple of other factories soon if it wanted them to enter production in time.
Now Musk has confirmed that Tesla is aiming to announce another factory location later this year during an interview with the Wall Street Journal:
We will probably pick another location [for a Tesla factory] toward the end of this year.
The CEO didn’t hint where it could be.
Where will Tesla’s next Gigafactory be?
There have been many locations that have been rumored lately.
For example, we know that Tesla has been exploring a potential factory in Canada for the last year, with company visiting sites in Ontario and Quebec. More recently, we have learned that Tesla has been looking in India and France.
Electrek’s Take
To be honest, if Tesla wants to achieve its goal, it should probably announce a new factory in Canada, India, and France within the next 12 months. All factories are not as fast as Giga Shanghai in getting to production.
Where will the next factory will be announced? Let us know your best guess in the comments section below.
My best guess, you ask? It sounds like Tesla is getting close to a deal in India, which is also the biggest market Tesla has yet to enter. If not, Canada would make a lot of sense, though Tesla might not want to build batteries instead of cars there.
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Microsoft signs deal with Swedish partner to remove 3.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide
WattEV has just opened the first electric truck charging depot in the US to use the new Megawatt Charge System, capable of delivering up to 1.2 megawatts of power, currently the highest-speed charger available in the US, along with solar and battery backup on-site and a unique partially grid-islanded setup.
WattEV says that its charge depot in Bakersfield, CA, includes the first MCS charger in North America, and the fastest as well. Tesla has a number of its own 750kW chargers deployed “behind-the-fence” in Pepsi and Tesla facilities, but this 1.2MW charger beats those in speed and is also publicly available.
MCS is a new charge standard being worked on by charging standards organization CharIN. The standard is close to being finished, though currently there aren’t really available MCS-capable trucks, or even UL-certified charging units.
As a result, WattEV’s installation is somewhat of an experiment. The site has 50 total chargers, split between 32 grid-tied 360kW CCS chargers on one side, and 3 1.2MW MCS and 15 240kW CCS chargers on the other side, attached to backup batteries and solar and fully grid-islanded.
That latter part is particularly interesting – WattEV got grants from the California Energy Commission to create this grid-islanded setup, wherein power for the chargers is fully provided by 5MW of on-site solar (which WattEV wants to expand to 25MW eventually) and 3MWh of battery backup.
WattEV could connect the setup to the grid, but between its grant from CEC, the lack of UL-certified MCS chargers, and delays that would have been caused in the permitting and interconnection process, it decided that grid-islanding half of the site would be the right decision for the time being.
The inclusion of an MCS charger promises the ability to fill a truck in the same time as a traditional truck rest stop. While trucks don’t currently have 1.2MW charging capability, WattEV wanted to be ready for when they do.
Notably, something many operators bring up is that they’re waiting for chargers before they start building or buying trucks. Here, however, we have an infrastructure provider out in the lead – building infrastructure before trucks are being built or purchased. In a world where operators have gotten used to using infrastructure as an excuse, WattEV seems uninterested in allowing them to continue to use that excuse.
Like WattEV’s other chargers, this one will be publicly available either via membership or scanning a credit card/QR code at the site. It’s near an industrial park in Bakersfield with several distribution centers and near the 99 freeway, which services the California central valley. WattEV also offers a “truck-as-a-service” model, wherein the company offers electric trucking at a set price with lower startup costs.
The charger could be of use for those distribution centers, bringing goods in from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and also for traffic in the valley, as there are many local farming facilities and produce delivery services (for example, OK Produce in Fresno, which has committed to full zero emission operations).
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