Tesla’s famous Nevada Gigafactory has been under construction for three years but it has only been completed 30 percent. It is one of the key strategic assets for Tesla to secure battery cell supply. In fact, some of the space in the Gigafactory was reserved for Panasonic as the leading electric car maker had partnered with the Japanese company. Panasonic is said to deploy a new battery cell production capacity at the facility which Tesla will use to build battery packs for its vehicles and Powerwall products.
Originally, the plant was to produce 105GWh battery cells per year and 150GWh of battery packs per year. This would’ve made this Gigafactory the largest building in the world. But this hasn’t happened as both Tesla and Panasonic have just used up 30 percent of the space and focussed its energies on optimizing the current production facility. Panasonic’s Celina Mikolajczak, its Vice President for battery technology in North America has revealed what the future expansions are in-store for the Gigafactory. Mikolajczak was actually formerly at Tesla where she was an expert in batteries and technical leaders in the development and validation of lithium-ion batteries.
Mikolajczak has released a slide that shows the plan for the future sections of the Gigafactory. Panasonic currently occupies the majority of the factory, but future expansions are meant to give Tesla more manufacturing space, more battery manufacturing space for Panasonic and additional space for raw materials.Now this factory has 13 battery cell assembly lines 24 hours per day 7 days a week producing 35GWh of battery cells per year. With the extra space, the factory could top beyond the 105GWh battery cell capacity.