It will also need to ramp up production of Powerwalls and Powerpacks, the company’s energy-storage systems for homes and commercial and utility use. By midyear, the plant will need to crank out 75 Li-ion cells per second for the Model 3, Tesla’s much-anticipated electric car for the masses. Within the next several months, the first battery packs produced entirely in house are set to begin rolling off the assembly lines. The Gigafactory did all that without producing a single EV battery-a situation that’s about to change. According to the energy market research firm Navigant Research, Tesla’s push is a leading factor behind a projected 60 percent growth in sales of battery EVs in 2017. Competing automakers doubled down on electric-vehicle development, while energy storage vendors scaled up battery production and slashed prices. The Gigafactory’s promise to push lithium batteries to unprecedented scale quickly became a symbol that clean energy could be big and powerful, and the very idea of it shifted the trajectories for both the automotive and energy-storage industries. The Gigafactory would make batteries cheaper than ever before, which would in turn ramp up electric vehicle sales and meaningfully cut petroleum consumption everywhere. “It has to be big because the world is big,” Musk said last July. The Gigafactory, Tesla CEO Elon Musk proclaimed, would be the world’s biggest building by footprint, spanning 107 American football fields, and it would produce at least 35 gigawatt-hours of batteries per year-more than the entire global output of lithium batteries in 2013. Nothing remotely like it had ever been proposed. Three years ago, Tesla Motors announced its plans to build the Gigafactory, a sprawling lithium-ion battery plant in the parched hills outside Sparks, Nev.
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