10 March, 2016, USA: Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla has always been a person who believes in bigger ideas. The man, with a wide vision is all set to build a monster factory called ‘Gigafactory’. This US $5 billion project when completed, it is not only going to be the World’s largest factory but it is going to be the World’s first workhouse which runs on 100 per cent on renewable sources of energy.
All the operations of this unit will be powered by renewable sources of energy with the goal of achieving net zero energy, meaning it generates and stores as much renewable energy as it needs to run the facility. However, the detailed information about the working of the plant is not revealed yet.
During his recent talk at the university of Nevada, JB Straubel, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Oficer, Tesla said, “The Gigafactory is maybe the best example we can talk about with this. You know, from the get-go, from the first concept of this factory, we wanted to make it a net-zero facility. So, you know, the most visible thing we are doing is covering the entire site with solar power. The whole roof of the Gigafactory was designed from the beginning with solar in mind. We kept all of the mechanical equipment off the roof. We didn’t put extra, sorta, penetrations through the roof that we didn’t need to and it’s a very, very clean surface that we can completely cover in solar. But that’s not enough solar, though. So we have also gone to the surrounding hillsides that we can’t use for other functions and we’re adding solar to those.”
The company wanted to have its operations completely running on solar energy with zero emissions as it justifies its brand name. As per Straubel, the company has not even looked for any other energy alternatives such as Gas.
“The other interesting thing is we wanted to manage the emissions from the Gigafactory. Solar power can do some of that, but we took kind of a radical move in the beginning and said we are not going to burn any fossil fuels in the factory. You know, zero emissions. We are going to build a zero-emissions factory just like the car. So, instead of kind of fighting this battle in hindsight, we just said we are not even going to have a natural gas pipeline coming to the factory, so we didn’t even build it,” elaborates Straubel.
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