Photo: Panasonic
Tesla supplier Panasonic currently produces around two billion cells per year at its large-scale electric vehicle (EV) battery plant, the first of its kind in the U.S., located at the former’s Gigafactory in Nevada.
However, the battery plant wasn’t as productive since day one. Panasonic started building this facility in 2015, and it took the Japanese electronics giant years to get to this point. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, the head of Panasonic’s EV battery business outlined some of the challenges the company faced setting up production in the U.S. as more players start to enter the industry.
“The word ‘gigafactory’ has often been thrown around recently, but just how big one of these is and how many resources it requires is hard to imagine,” said Yasuaki Takamoto. Panasonic’s battery manufacturing facility at Giga Nevada is roughly the size of 90 football fields.
The Panasonic exec said one of the biggest issues was training workers for a process as fragile and detail-oriented as battery production, where the slightest exposure to moisture can lead to an entire batch having to be thrown out.
What’s more, Panasonic also underestimated the difficulty of migrating its battery production processes and equipment from Asia to the U.S. The company was surprised to find that American workers’ hands were sometimes too big to operate machinery made in and for Asia. “It sounds like a joke, but these kinds of issues were frequently encountered in the early stages,” said Takamoto.
As a result of these unforeseen setbacks, Panasonic’s planned ramp-up in production was delayed by a year or two. Currently, however, Panasonic says its Giga Nevada plant is capable of producing 38 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity per year, which is enough to power about 600,000 Standard Range Model 3s from Tesla.
What’s more, Takamoto said that Panasonic is looking to raise output in Nevada. The Tesla supplier won’t stop there, either, and is reportedly planning to build a $4 billion battery plant in De Soto, Kansas, followed by another potential U.S. factory, possibly in Kansas or Oklahoma.
In addition to Tesla, Panasonic last year also agreed to supply EV batteries to Lucid Motors.
For more information, check out The Wall Street Journal‘s full story.
