In an industrial park outside Reno
Construction on Tesla’s lithium-ion battery factory has already started east of Reno.
Tesla Motors today closed its deal to acquire the 980-acre site in an industrial park outside Reno where it has already begun pouring concrete for a giant lithium-ion battery factory.
Lance Gilman, a principal and partner with the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, told Fortune today that papers have been filed in the Storey County courthouse transferring the “gigafactory” site to the automaker. Tesla TSLA -1.82% is getting the land for free, along with a $1.3-billion package of economic-development incentives it negotiated with Nevada.
Scheduled for completion in 2020, the gigafactory is intended to produce 500,000 battery packs a year, mostly to be shipped to the company’s auto-assembly plant in Fremont, California, for use its promised mass-market electric car.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said his company will start producing the car, priced at about $35,000, in 2017. He says the gigafactory—intended to double worldwide lithium-cell production—will cut battery costs by more than 30%, helping make the new car affordable. Tesla’s current Model S starts at about $70,000.
Battery production at the gigafactory is supposed to begin in 2017 and peak battery production should be reached when the gigafactory is fully complete in 2020. When finished, he says, the building will likely total between five and six million square feet—nearly as big as the Pentagon. The gigafactory is expected to cost $5 billion and employ about 6,500 workers.