Saturday, September 6, 2014

Tesla chooses Nevada for its $5 billion battery plant

To bring electric cars to the masses, Tesla Motors will use an expanse of desert where wild mustangs still roam for a factory that the company projects will crank out enough batteries to power 500,000 vehicles annually by decade’s end. - California News

Aside from low tax rates and business-friendly workplace laws, Nevada offered plenty of sun and wind to generate “green” power. The industrial park is only about 200 miles along Interstate 80 from Tesla’s lone auto assembly plant in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s also near a deposit of lithium, an essential element to produce the battery cells.

Nevada wins Tesla’s gigafactory sweepstakes - Grist

The news comes as a surprise to absolutely no one. Nevada does, after all, have the only active lithium mine in the country, which is helpful if you’re in the lithium-ion battery business. It’s close to Tesla’s current manufacturing complex in Fremont, Calif. It has access to a considerable amount of wind and geothermal energy. It has a whole lot of sun — which is useful when your CEO also happens to be chairman of a solar panel company (as is the case with Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, and the solar panel manufacturer Solar City). It’s a tax haven – no personal income tax, franchise tax, estate tax, corporate income tax or taxes on corporate shares. And it apparently offered Tesla one of the largest incentive packages in the history of automotive plants.
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Losing Tesla was a key topic in gubernatorial debate.