Photo: Tesla
Tesla continues to work on expanding solar installations on the roof of Giga Nevada, which will help the company make the factory carbon neutral. At the moment, the installation size is 8 MW, and the company uses the generated energy for its operations on a daily basis.
All new Tesla factories are designed to be covered in solar panels. According to the 2021 Tesla Impact Report, as of the end of the past year, the company has installed 21,405 kW of solar panels and continues to increase capacity. The manufacturer said the vast majority of solar panels were installed on the rooftops of Gigafactory Nevada, Gigafactory New York, and its California manufacturing facilities. Although Tesla did not say how many and where they were installed, new information indicates that solar installation in Nevada will continue to grow.
The newly appointed senior director of vehicle operations and manufacturing engineering at Tesla, Hrushikesh (Hrushi) Sagar, recently visited Giga Nevada where he held a staff meeting. He spoke about the achievements of the company, its factories, development prospects, and much more. The audio recording of the meeting was listened to by CNBC. Among other top executives, Jeff Jackson, Director of Engineering, Construction, and Facilities Operations spoke to the staff.
Jackson talked about the Giga Nevada rooftop solar installation. He told the staff that at the moment, solar panels with a capacity of about 8MW are installed there. All the electricity generated is used daily by the factory to make its operations more environmentally friendly. For comparison, at the end of 2020, the capacity of the installation was 3.2 MW.
“Right now we've got about eight megawatts on the roof that we're able to use on a daily basis, which is really exciting,” Jackson said.
Based on satellite imagery on buildingtesla.com, Tesla continues to actively install solar panels on the roof of Giga Nevada. Over the past 19 months, the company has installed several new rows of large solar panel clusters. Comparative shots from this period show that the total installation size has more than doubled during this period, indicating a significant increase in efforts to make the plant carbon neutral.
Although it is difficult to see the exact number of rows due to the low quality of the images, Tesmanian did its best to calculate their approximate number. In January 2021, the number of rows of solar panel clusters reached about nine. It is worth bearing in mind that the size of the cluster in each row is different. The length of each row of clusters is about 52 rows of solar panels. The width of each row of clusters is from five to nine solar panels, and the number of rows, consisting of nine solar panels in width, is the vast majority, as you can see in the feature image above the article (the photo presented does not show Tesla's recent progress in installing solar panels). Since January 2021, in 19 months, the number of rows of clusters has increased by 17, up to 26 rows.
© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.
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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.
