Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla announced their plans to construct the world’s largest battery-cell factory at the company’s electric car plant near Berlin. Construction of the company’s large gigafactory has already begun in a forested region in Gruenheide, south of Berlin, and is due to be completed by 2021. The factory is Tesla’s first in Europe and is expected to churn out 500,000 Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs per year. Elon Musk at a recent Battery Conference announced that the battery cell production at the same German site would start with a capacity of around 100-gigawatt hours a year, before ramping up to 250 GWh per year, at which the CEO said he was “pretty confident it’d be the largest battery-cell plant in the world”.
Also Read: Tesla releases footprint documents for huge factory in Austin.
Tesla has, however, filed no building applications for Giga Berlin’s battery facility. No preliminary discussions about Musk’s new announcement have also taken place. the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research in Karlsruhe has analyzed the battery market to provide an estimate about the upcoming facility’s workforce. According to the institute, about 40 workers are required for each gigawatt-hour of battery power in battery cell production. The facility may require 4,000 employees initially, then ramp to 10,000 workers when it reaches its optimum annual capacity. Interestingly enough, the Federal Minister of Economics has also hinted at 10,000 jobs being generated by the initiative.
Among skilled workers in technical professions, the chambers of industry and commerce in both Berlin and Brandenburg are forecasting a shortage of 31,000 workers next year. Fortunately for Tesla, the company does have the advantage of being an attractive employer, thanks in part to its character and products, as well as its generous basic compensation package, which pays 2,700 euros per month to workers without education and who were unemployed at the time of their application.
