Tesla Gigafactory Rooftop Solar System To Be ~7 Times Larger Than Largest Rooftop Solar System Today

January 16th, 2017 by James Ayre

A document created for the recent investor event at Tesla’s under-construction Gigafactory facility in Nevada recently made its way into our hands here at CleanTechnica, revealing that the company’s planned solar PV infrastructure for the facility will total 70 megawatts (MW) in nameplate capacity once complete.

Also notable is that the rooftop portion of this planned 70 MW rooftop + ground-installation will apparently be ~7 times larger “than the largest rooftop solar system installed today.”

The document reiterates the point that the Gigafactory will be powered entirely without direct consumption of fossil fuels — on-site electricity use will be provided entirely by on-site solar PV systems and waste heat recovery.

A couple of other things worth noting:

The Gigafactory’s closed-loop water supply system utilizes 6 “different treatment systems to efficiently re-circulate about 1.5 million liters of water, representing an 80% reduction in fresh water usage compared with standard processes.”

Work has already begun on the site’s recycling facility, which will reprocess “all types of Tesla battery cells, modules, and packs, into various metal products for reuse in new cells.”

To go over a couple of often discussed figures again, once Phase 2 construction is completed (it’s currently underway) annualized battery cell production capacity will total 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh) and annualized battery pack production will total 50 GWh.

The battery cell figures will reportedly allow Tesla to produce around 500,000 all-electric cars, according to the document. The pack production, on the other hand, relates not just to electric vehicles but also to energy storage products — so it sounds like the company is leaving things open to continue relying on third-party cells for its energy storage products if need be (if demand is too high for current production).











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