Tesla Set to Revolutionise The Automobile Industry

Tesla Gigafactory

Tesla, a leading manufacturer of electric vehicle has a new mission in its sights, it is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable transportation not dependent on fossil fuels and producing these vehicles in sufficient volumes to force in the automobile industry.  The plan to achieve this with a proposed volume of 500,00 vehicles annually in the later half of this decade.  For this goal to be realised, Tesla would require the entire worldwide production of lithium batteries, which brings the Tesla Gigafactory into the picture which will produce enough lithium batteries to meet their vehicle demand.

Tesla broke ground in June 2014 outside Sparks, Nevada and is expected to begin battery production by 2017.  They will reach full capacity by 2020 when they will be able to produce more batteries annually than were produced in 2013.

Their batteries will be produced at significantly less cost due to economies of scale, innovative manufacturing, waste reduction and optimization of locating most of their manufacturing material under one roof.  With all this in place, they are expected to drive the per kilowatt hour (KWh) cost of their battery pack down by 30 percent. The Gigafactory will also generate their own power from renewable sources achieving net zero energy costs in their production process.

The name Gigafactory comes from the factory’s planned annual battery production capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). “Giga” is a unit of measurement that represents “billions”. One GWh is the equivalent of generating (or consuming) one billion watts for one hour—one million times that of one kWh.

This shows that the renewable energy presents a tremendous opportunity for a country like Nigeria usher in an industrial revolution by being smart.  Solar power can to a large extent replace expensive diesel generators, thereby crashing the cost of local manufacturing.  I firmly believe that the path to status transition from third world to developed nationhood lies in industrialisation.