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German government wants to support Tesla battery cell plant with 1.14B euros
- plouffy 5y agoAt 2000 jobs(maybe) that's 570,000 euros a job created.
- gtirloni 5y agoAlso need to take into account all the taxes it'll collect.
- google234123 5y agoYou are right, let’s just stick with coal mines and plants since they have the most efficient euro/job/energy value.
- Tenoke 5y agoI guess they benefit more than just the jobs (which I am not sure are even all going to German citizens) but it does seem like poor value especially as they are hardly leaving after committing so much.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Forge36 5y agoOver how many years?
- jsight 5y agoThat doesn't necessarily seem like a terrible sum, if the jobs are sustainable and the 2k is a lower bound. OTOH, it seems likely the jobs would be created there without this payment, so why do it?
- londons_explore 5y agoBatteries are easy and cheap enough to ship - either as cells or completed packs. They'll build the plant wherever gives the most incentives.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- max-ibel 5y agoDoesn't it all depend a lot of details that are not published ? If the 2000 jobs are Fraunhofer/Max Planck Institute battery chemistry researchers and engineers, than this is great news and will help developing a solid industrial battery base in Germany. Well done! If the 2000 jobs are Gabelstaplerfahrer, and all the tech / research is done in the US, then yeah, the investment is mostly in the construction/services sector, which doesn't seem great. This is oversimplified, but my guess is that Tesla doesn't want to outsource the core tech/research, so we're going to see more Gabelstaplerfahrer and less Fraunhofer/MPI.
- panick21 5y agoGo look at how their manufacturing line works. They don't to do stupid work. They need to control a highly complex chemical manufacturing plant and likely battery recycling plant. Researching is not the only work that requires more then manual labor. Go look at Nevada, after the Gigafactory there are now a number of battery companies located there.
- avianlyric 5y agoIf it was a pure job creation program that would be pretty poor value for money, but based on the article there’s a slightly larger play here. Notability Germany wants to build technological independence, and I imagine part of that is becoming world leaders in battery manufacturing. Even if they don’t end up with Tesla IP, the knowledge that ends up in peoples heads and eventually spreads around the German economy will be incredibly valuable. Given the EU ban on ICE cars in the near future, and the size Germany’s car manufacturing industry, it makes perfect sense for the German government to spend potential very large sums of money to make sure the next generation of cars is built in Germany. Not just ensuring their automotive industry keeps going, but also make it harder for other economies to compete by ensuring the majority of the manufacturing expertise world wide lives in German brains.
- askafriend 5y agoWorth it. It’s also a strategic advantage to build battery manufacturing capacity domestically.
- epistasis 5y agoAgreed. I think that battery production, unlike solar panel production, will be highly incentivized today be local. Batteries are very heavy in kg/€ compared to other products. There are big advantages to keeping this somewhat local. Shipping batteries over seas or cross continent, after the raw materials have also been shopped long distances, will likely be economically inefficient.
- avianlyric 5y agoI also wonder if batteries can be commoditised the same way solar panels have been. Battery chemistry and manufacturing processes seem to be much more complex than solar panels, additionally there seems to be significantly more trade offs to be made by car manufacturers, than solar panel installers.
- epistasis 5y agoI think that they will eventually become components not unlike current solar panels and inverters. I wouldn't underestimate the complexity of solar panels, there's massive continuous innovation just as there is with batteries.
- krisoft 5y agoI’m not following what you say about the weight. You know what is heavy and relatively cheap? Steel. Yet we ship it all around. A Tesla S battery is reported to weight 544kg and costs an estimated 15000 USD. That gives us 0.04 kg/USD. For steel one estimate gives us that 1000kg goes for 1100 USD. Which gives us 0.9 kg/USD. I thought maybe i’m missing your point so I did the same calculation for something light and expensive we are shipping around too. One can buy 0.49kg ipad for 440 USD. Which gives us 0.001 kg/USD. So batteries are somewhere between steel and ipads in terms of kg/$. Can you explain what makes both of those ends shipable while batteries won’t be?
- louwrentius 5y agoTesla should pay Germany 1.14B euros for their permission to build a battery cell plant in Germany.
- jdthedisciple 5y agoWeird logic. You think Germany is not gonna profit massively - both monetarily as well as otherwise - already?
- bsksi 5y agoThen they'll build it and create the jobs somewhere else.
- judge2020 5y agoWith the amount of legal fees and payroll spent on getting permission to put it up, I think they’ll eventually hit that mark.
- panick21 5y agoWhy?
- mrshadowgoose 5y agoI can only speculate, but within the last few years it's become vogue to hate on Elon Musk and his companies, despite the incredible amount of good Tesla has been doing for humanity and the planet.
- whoknowswhat11 5y agoEach time they do something it costs a ton - they have 800 complaints pending for their latest efforts to get through. The Berlin Brandenburg Airport took 25+ years to get build, 14+ YEARS of construction. So germaney often does take it's time. Project costs went from $2.xB to something like $10B plus. Telsa is a private company, so probably can't afford overruns in time / cost of this nature (ie, 10 years later to open the factory, $8B over budget etc. Germany also seems eager to maybe balance some of the things that make everything go slow with getting something done.
- thg 5y agoOf course they do.. I sincerely hope the CDU* doesn't get that through before the election and that they also end up in the opposition and never get to "govern" again. *The C stands for Christianity, but it might just as well stand for Corruption. Would be a lot more accurate too.
- erichahn 5y agowhats wrong with battery factory
- Jarcel 5y agoIn case anyone wants a summary (in german) of the crimes and failures that happenend during the last years, I compiled a website a couple of weeks ago: https://crimedrivenunion.de/ https://crimedrivenunion.de/
- allendoerfer 5y agoThat's a cool website! I have played with the idea of building something like this. A sort of blacklist for members of parliament for obvious unpunished corruption and crimes. With rules about how to get on and off of it etc. But the case of Andreas Scheuer let's me doubt the effectiveness of such a thing: Everybody knows about the 500 million € he wasted, but since the party is just not affected by it in polls, it does not care and nothing happens.
- jll29 5y agoIt would be nice to have this for all parties in power, and in machine-readable format. To make use of it for further analysis, some meta-data and normalisation would be helpful, e.g. whether someone received media allegations about corruption versus someone was actually fined. The result could be used by journalists to generate infographics, and to select and slice-and-dice data for better reporting. At the moment, reporting is mostly on single incidents; only occasionally, at the end of articles, related incidents are mentioned. Systemic issues (e.g. regular political corruption in a party) require more long-term data gathering, which journalists rarely take the time for, and such a data-set could be very useful background material for it.
- nikkinana 5y agoThose Germans are full of shit, they hate Tesla. It's just to buy some time until they can cram a shit hybrid drive into their overpriced BMW and Mercedes crap wagons.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoSo how much does a local plumber get for starting his own company?
- ChemSpider 5y agoThere is funding available for plumbers as well! It is called "Gründungszuschuss" (a few 1000 euros or more).
- allendoerfer 5y agoIf he starts a battery cell plant he will get about 1/4,5 of his own investment from IPCEI. But there are more programs he can apply to from KfW and Agentur für Arbeit, especially if he is starting his company from a previous unemployment.
- hfbkl 5y agoHave you tried applying for these programs? On paper the possibilities are endless in Germany. In practice it is hard to even get social security or apartments. Most money in Germany goes to parasites like friends of the CDU, rich large corporations like Tesla, the state TV cronies, civil servants and the interest group of the day (refugees in 2015).
- f6v 5y agoI know many people on a government startup stipend. Doesn’t seem that hard.
- fishmaster 5y agoWell, let me tell you from experience that everything is difficult in Germany due to insane bureaucracy. I applied for student funding twice and twice I had to pay everything back due to technicalities. I would not consider founding a startup in Germany.
- allendoerfer 5y ago> In practice it is hard to even get social security or apartments. No, it is not hard to get social security. It is also not hard to get an apartment. It might be hard for you to get an apartment in an area that is in high demand. You should not demand easier social security from society and then be so quick to call those exact civil servants handing it out parasites.
- ChemSpider 5y agoNote that this is not Tesla specific. The funding is based on a very good EU initiative. Any battery manufacturer can apply: https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/tesla-bmw-stellantis-others-approved-share-35b-eu-battery-aid https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/tesla-bmw-stellantis-... Money well spent in my opinion. Tesla will pay this back with their taxes (etc) within a few years.
- qeternity 5y ago> Money well spent in my opinion. Tesla will pay this back with their taxes (etc) within a few years. How do you arrive at this conclusion?
- ChemSpider 5y agoThe Tesla Berlin car factory alone costs 4 billion euros. A large part of this sum is going to local construction companies. So in some sense, they already paid for it.
- qeternity 5y agoWhat? That’s not how this works. If the government gives me €1B and I go buy gold with it, just because I’ve spent it locally does not make it a productive use of proceeds.
- epistasis 5y agoThat's because you bought gold rather than purchasing productive aspects of the economy, which goes back to labor. Buying up stores of wealth instead of purchasing services is a very bad way to stimulate the economy.
- qeternity 5y agoYou’ve missed the point entirely, as that is precisely my point. Merely hand waving it away and saying “it was spent on local construction companies” is not a sufficient argument. It takes a hell of a lot to justify these sorts of investments and usually the ROI doesn’t materialize for the State.
- jll29 5y agoThe European Commission invests in R&D of a range of topics, including but not limited to battery technology. The Tesla factory is controversial not just because of the funding it gets but also because of the environmental damage to the environment (and starting construction work without receiving a permit): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-gigafactory-germany-idUSKBN20A0KK https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-gigafactory-germany...
- Shadonototro 5y agoGermany didn't learn a thing, at all Don't plant seeds in your own people Import foreign plants, better, let your own seeds rot