a 100 GWh 4680 cell factory (with capacity to produce enough batteries for 1.5 million light-duty vehicles annually)
and the first high-volume Semi factory.
Semi is the fully electric combination truck, with 500 miles of range and energy consumption of 1.7 KWh per mile.
Analysis
Tesla might be seeing better production ramp or at least confidence in overcoming ramping issues in the Austin and Berlin 4680 factories. This would give Tesla confidence to start another 4680 battery factory.
If all of the 100 GWh 4680 batteries went to Tesla Semi trucks this would be enough batteries for about 110,000 Tesla 500 mile range Semis per year.
The 4680 battery ramp has been slower than expected. Tesla had originally targeted 100 GWh of 4680 batteries in 2022.
Tesla is has a gold of 1 Terawatt hour per year of batteries produced by Tesla in the USA as soon as possible. Batteries produced in the USA by Tesla will get $45 per kWh from the Inflation Reduction Act. This would be $45 billion per year from 1 TWh/year of batteries and $4.5 billion per year from 100 GWh/year.
Gigafactory Nevada so Far
Since 2014, Tesla has invested $6.2 billion in Nevada and built a 5.4 million square foot Gigafactory. The buildout alone provided 17,000 local construction jobs.
To date, the team at Gigafactory Nevada has successfully produced:
7.3 billion battery cells (37 GWh+ annually)
1.5 million battery packs
3.6 million drive units
1 million energy modules (14 GWh+ total)
To complete this work, they hired more than 11,000 team members.
SOURCE – Tesla
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Goat, you’re comparing the ANNUAL GWh figure with the TOTAL number of batteries since 2014.
Remember the excuse for not increasing output at GF1 ,was that there were no workers, when we have no trouble sourcing workers for the South Pole of the Moon ,or Antartica,you just have to increase the pay slightly to get more workers.
They may not meet projections, but they are making lots of noise like they’ll make plenty of semis, of course that was true of solar roofs as well.
No workers at a pay rate that is profitable = no workers for any useful definition.
Nobody is seriously interpreting this as meaning “even if we offered $500/h we would still have zero people”.
Me and my Calculator …
If 37 GWh comes from 7.3 billion batteries then –>
37 GWh = 37,000 MWh = 37,000,000 kWh = 37,000,000,000 Wh
divide by 7.3 billion = 7,300,000,000 equals 5 Wh per cell.
5? I thought the 4680 cells were a bit more potent than 5 Wh/cell.
5 Wh/cell = 200 cells per kWh. See?
That sounds weenie.
So, a Google search “energy capacity 4680 cell”
That turns up that they should have almost 100 Wh/cell. Ahem… 20x more than me and my trusty calculator produce. Why’s that? What’re we missing? Inquiring OLD minds want to know!
GoatGuy
My comment went a wandering…
But it’s
37 GWh per year
7.3 billion batteries since 2014
So not 37 GWh from 7.3 billion batteries.
Hm.. But when can they start outputting batteries from the Nevada factory? 2024?
And what about the production of batteries in Austin, when will that pick up speed?
When looking at the Musk enterprises and the speed of the scaling and progress compared to what we are used to, something is very different…
This is especially true for SpaceX. We tend to focus on the spectacular output but hidden in these organizations must be some super-human project managers or some sort of disrupting process models we haven’t heard of.
I would love to see some journalistic work and articles around something seemingly boring as SpaceX or Tesla project management. To me, this is the superpower enabling what we are seeing. How do they do it?
Search youtube for “Joe Justice Agile Tesla” for some information about how they work. It’s totally unlike any other company.
Thanks for that link!
Having worked in traditional companies with both waterfall and agile methodology, that blows my mind. If it’s true and if it’s really working, it is truly disrupting and deserves more attention.
I wonder how the employees handle this in the long run. Aren’t they burning out?