Photo credit: @tobilindh/Twitter
Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy, Peter Altmaier, has repeatedly stated that Tesla is a very important project for Germany. Last year, he stressed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk's decision to build a large battery and assembly plant near Berlin is an important milestone in the transition to electric mobility in Europe. He believes that Germany has won in competition with other European countries.
Altmaier has long been pushing for a European initiative to produce battery cells, which are key to the production of electric vehicles, in collaboration mainly with France. Tesla can now play a key role in this.
German automakers supply most of the battery cells for their electric vehicles from Asia, but the federal government wants to change that. In this regard, almost 3 billion euros have been allocated to support the establishment of a battery cell production facility in Germany.
Tesla, which is currently building its first factory in Europe, is likely benefit from this. The company can count on a "significant subsidy" from the government, Altmeier said, from the sidelines of the European Conference on Batteries.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk took part in the conference, and said that at the time being, Tesla is piloting its new battery cell production at Fremont. But the company plans to ultimately move this production to Giga Berlin, where it will continue to scale this new cell production technology. Musk said that 100 GWh of annual cell production is possible for the German battery plant, but that is not the limit. “I can even imagine expanding to 200 to 250 GWh,” he said. "I'm pretty sure that that would make it the largest battery factory in the world."
Funding details will appear as soon as the EU Commission approves the second consortium of battery cells. This is expected to happen before the end of this year. At the moment, the first battery project has already been approved with 17 companies from seven EU countries. The second European joint project includes about 50 companies from 12 countries.
© 2020, Eva Fox. All rights reserved.
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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter
About the Author
Eva Fox
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.
