Tesla To Address Environmental Concerns Over Planned Gigafactory Berlin In Germany

Featured image: @gigafactory_4 / Twitter

Tesla will redesign its Giga Berlin plans to meet all environmental requirements and ensure that its first European factorycan begin production of cars in about a year.

From the very beginning, Tesla was confronted with the concern of local residents on several environmental issues related to the pine plantation, the use of water by the factory and the animals & insects that lived in this territory.

Despite the fact that Tesla is cleaning up the industrial forest, it undertook to plant three times more of the real forest instead. And the company follows its promises. The Brandenburg Region Agency has found areas throughout the state for Tesla to plant new trees there. The company will plant not only pine trees, but also deciduous trees, which are more valuable from an environmental point of view.

Tesla has currently planted trees on approximately 40 hectares of land near Bad Sarov (Oder-Spree), in Lower Fleming (Teltov-Fleming) and south of Brandenburg-on-Havel and the first young trees are already growing there. The remaining afforestation areas should be planted in the winter of 2020. This is due to the fact that young trees, in recent years, are increasingly dying during the dry spring and summer months.

Tesla Germany Planting New Forests in Brandenburg https://t.co/ANTHDDOOiM pic.twitter.com/A0NkUwrQUo

— Tesmanian.com (@Tesmanian_com) May 28, 2020

Animals and insects were safely relocated to new habitats.

According to Jörg Steinbach, Brandenburg’s Minister of Economics, the new projects that will be presented by Tesla this or next week will solve some of these problems by reducing the amount of water needed and the waste water generated, Automotive News Europe reports. He said that after the public considers the new projects for 8 weeks, open hearings will be held by early September.

"We expect a proposal that in sum will be more environmentally acceptable and thereby even more approvable," Steinbach said in an interview.

The new Tesla plant is expected to employ 12,000 people who will assembly 500,000 cars a year. The Minister said that he expects that the first cars from the assembly line Giga Berlin will roll out in the first half of 2021.

"I assume that within the first half of next year cars will be rolling off the conveyor belt there."

Brandenburg government officials say they are well aware that time is of the essence because Tesla has a technological advantage over German competitors that he wants to use quickly. The California automaker wants to finish the factory in less time than it took to build a new factory in China, and at the moment, everything is going according to its plan.

Source: @tobilindh/Twitter

Steinbach said its employees communicate daily with Tesla representatives. Such cooperation includes solving various problems, from electricity and trains to passing through bureaucratic documents.

Steinbach admits that Tesla's unconventional business practices sometimes contradict Germans' propensity for highly structured planning. "It requires a lot of flexibility," he says.

For Brandenburg, Tesla is a landmark deal, because the state has struggled to attract large investors and jobs, and the arrival of the American automaker could potentially create an influx of other large employers. Brandenburg wants Tesla to become a stepping stone in the region’s plans to become the center of electric vehicles.

Together with neighboring Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony, the state will receive billions of euros for structural assistance, since coal mining and electricity generation will be stopped, which will become a potential source of financing to attract companies.