CATL Set Up New 80 GWh/Year Battery Factory in 3 Months

CATL set up a new battery factory in 3 months. It is right beside Tesla Giga Shanghai. The new iron LFP battery factory is already at 60% of planned capacity. The buildings existed and met CATL specs. They rapidly changed whatever needed to be changed and put in new equipment. It will have 80GWH/year planned capacity and is already working at 48 GWh/yr. This is 4 GWH per month and soon 6.5 GWH/month. This is enough for 65,000 cars per month and soon 100,000 cars per month.

Tesla is battery and chip constrained. Tesla produced 70,000 cars per month in December, 2021 and 52,000 to 56,000 in each of September, October and November 2021. Tesla made about 180,000 cars in China in Q4, 2021 and 305,000 cars worldwide.

Tesla could use the new capacity to get to 350,000 to 440,000 cars in Q1 of 2022. Tesla is acquiring more battery supply from other providers as well.

CATL has 55% of the China battery market.

SOURCES- Electric Viking
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

14 thoughts on “CATL Set Up New 80 GWh/Year Battery Factory in 3 Months”

  1. Well planning is not enough. They would have had to place orders months ahead. And would they place a purchase order for equipment without first buying the building? Probably not, right? So they started negotiating the price of the building months before placing the orders for machinery.

    And then it becomes a question of semantics. Does "building" a factory include delivery times of machinery and the time from purchasing the building/land, or does it only include installation time of the equipment? I would think the former..

  2. But still… Suppose they make the decision to "go" in August and start placing orders for product equipment. Big rollers for the cathode and anode. Ovens for drying out the electrode solutions. Forming equipment. A.s.o.

    How fast do you think they will get them? My guess: 6 months, if they push the supplier. Unless, of course, the supplier just happens to have a few "extra" rollers lying around…

    Having gotten the equipment, the supplier typically have to help to get it going. Another few weeks.

    And what about the raw materials supply? Can they just siphon off some from their regular production? Or do they have set up new contracts?

    Something is not right here. 3 months is to fast. Either they started placing orders for equipment months in advance, or there is an error in translation.

  3. Unless they have learned the lesson Elon taught in the past:
    the difficult part is not to invent something new but to design the machine to produce it.
    Gigafactory is the machine to produce the cars.
    When they have fixed up near all problems, getting a new, identical production line is way faster and easier.

  4. Agree.

    And I just heard – on the "Tesla Daily Show" – that the new Megapack and (possibly) power wall production capacity will use CATL LFP cells.

  5. Yes, they are buying LFP cells to use in their battery packs, but Tesla does not *produce* their own LFP cells. See?

    If they would have developed their own LFP cells, how fast could they ramp their battery cell production? What would be the energy density of their LFP cells?

  6. I'm not sure where you check this off on the order form, but I believe LFP batteries are now available for the Model 3 and Y in the US.

  7. Jeff Dahn should have researched LFP batteries rather than NMC batteries, since iron is so much abundant than nickel. And if he had, there would have a been a "trace" of articles and patents just as there were for the nickel batteries, so I guess he did not.

    I would like Tesla to produce their own LFP batteries, not just the NMC batteris. And of course buy all the batteries they can get their hands on…

  8. Long term it should.

    I don't understand why Tesla doesn't allready make the power walls with LFP batteries. The lower performance at lower temperatures is not relevant when the pack is inside. Higher cycle life for LFP batteries compared to NMC batteries, lower cost.. Much higher availability. Only drawback is a slightly lower energy density, but that is not critical for a power wall.

  9. Unfortunately this won’t help me get the two Powerwalls I’ve had on order since June 2021 any sooner.

  10. I don't believe it. 3 months is too little time.

    Even if CATL only had to install the equipment in the houses, going from zero to 60% of targeted production in 3 months is incredibly fast.

    Presumably, CATL had to order production equipment from suppliers. So are we to believe that suppliers could take an order for production equipment and deliver it faster than 3 months plus get them running..? Even big, complicated equipment….?

    And then you have the personnel. Hire and train them in less than 3 months..?

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