Tesla's German plant hits snag as public consultation repeated

Change in the way the German government operates? I hope not, but I also doubt it.

Or maybe the math somehow works out, but I doubt it.

They're hoping to add a 250MW power plant which would be a major change but that would be part of a different environmental assessment.

They raised a howl because the plans say they will start on a power plant, whose impact is considered -- but 'oh my goodness, where will the gas come from? A well? Trucks? Oh my!'

Well -- that literally may not be known yet, as is when and whether they'd get close to running it at anything like capacity.

And that's not a problem; Texas has power plant regulators, and pipelines have their own paperwork and process.

The FAA regulating this is a bit funny anyway. :) Eventually that'll change, but right now they're doing a good job handling these weird corners of their responsibility with grace.

We also have a proud history of industrial corruption in Germany (we call it "Klüngel" because that sounds nicer), especially when it comes to public construction projects.

I find it a lot more likely that the failures are the result of a mix of public officials being overly hasty in trying to pave the road (so to speak) and making promises they couldn't deliver on, than that this is entirely down to traditional car manufacturers using their political leverage against Tesla. Especially given the location of the factory.

Water use is a bit of a misnomer though. It's not like agriculture where the water gets "fed" to plants and mostly evaporates.

Tesla plans to recycle/reuse most of the water at the Giga Berlin plant: https://insideevs.com/news/526187/tesla-minimizes-water-use-...

And yes, the positive impact of electric cars even considering all raw materials and water is unequivocal.

If Vegas did have a subway, it wouldn't have enough population to run every few minutes, so you'd have to wait a long time for the train. With the small cars you don't have to wait, and you get the equivalent of an express train every time.

But the big advantage is the cost -- subways cost hundreds of millions per mile.

This practice actually became somewhat infamous during the pandemic when an outbreak in a meat factory shined light on Eastern European workers' working and living conditions. The company went on to hire thousands of workers directly in an attempt to salvage some of its reputation but previously had outsourced the work to a network of such staffing companies it claimed to have no insight into while actually having funded (and likely owned) several of them.

- During the West/East divide, West Germany was financially kept alive through major subsidy from the outside, which created political and organizational structures not designed for self-sufficiency. After the unification those subsidies from the national state were all but halted, plunging the city into debt

- A ruthless debt management approach has kept the city from spending ever since, which has resulted in a lot of administrative functions stagnating or slowly deteriorating by e.g. not hiring

Things are improving now, slowly, due to the Capital City effect and the startup boom, but it's important that Berlin is special within in Germany in many ways. In most European countries, if you make a GDP-per-person stat, it falls considerably if you remove the capital city from the equation (say almost 20% in France). Germany is perhaps the only industrial country in the world where it goes up instead.

Note: The Tesla factory, despite being called "Giga Berlin" by Tesla, is being built in the state of Brandenburg, which is not the state of Berlin. Brandenburg has a different complex situation.