When it comes online, Tesla’s $5 billion “Gigafactory” will be one of the largest lithium-ion battery production facilities in the world.
Recently, Tesla tripled the amount of land the factory will cover, The Wall Street Journal’s Mike Ramsey reported.
The Palo Alto-based automaker originally purchased roughly 1,000 acres of land — in 2014 — outside of Reno, Nevada to construct its new battery factory.
According to the Journal, Tesla purchased another 2,000 acres of land near the original plot — effectively tripling Tesla’s land holdings.
Furthermore, it looks like most of the additional space — 1,863 acres — will be used as buffer land and will not be developed, the Journal reported.
However, there is a chance that the land could be used for solar panels.
Such a move would fall in line with Tesla’s corporate and CEO Elon Musk’s personal missions to provide environmentally sustainable energy.
The supply of batteries from the plant is expected to significantly lower the overall cost of battery packs for Tesla. The Gigafactory will be crucial in the automaker’s goal of selling 500,000 cars a year by 2020 — that’s ten times the number of cars Tesla is expected to deliver this year.
In addition to car production, a significant portion of output from the Gigafactory — operated in conjunction with Panasonic — will be devoted to production of batteries for home and commercial battery packs.
In total, the Nevada state government expects the Gigafactory to create as many as 9,000 jobs for the region.
As reported by Business Insider