Tesla To Nevada: You Can Haz Our Gigarockstarfactory. Thanks For The $1.2 Billion
As you may have heard by now, Nevada has more Gigafactory wooing skills and natural attraction than California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Tesla CEO, Chairman, and Product Architect Elon Musk and Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval announced that Nevada pulled Tesla in with an incentives package equal to $1.2 billion. Meh… I guess that will do.
Here’s a list of what Tesla is getting from Nevada:
- 20-year sales tax abatement (~$725 million)
- 10-year property tax abatement (~$332 million)
- transferable tax credits (~$195 million)
- business tax abatement (~$27 million)
- discounted electricity rates (~8 million)
That’s a pretty huge offering, but Elon said that it wasn’t even the largest but that there were other important matters that brought Tesla to Nevada (hopefully not the nightlife).
One important factor is that Nevada’s red tape is on a shorter spool than most places, which will allow Tesla to get its Gigafactory up and running sooner rather than later. Plus, California simply dropped the ball (or spool of red tape) by not voting on an incentives package at all.
Naturally, Nevada is expecting something in return. The goodies for giddy prom queen Nevada should include:
- ~6,500 direct jobs
- ~22,000 indirect jobs
- $3.5 billion invested in manufacturing equipment and property (the total cost of the Gigafactory is estimated to be $6 billion)
- ~20% boost in economic activity in the Reno area
Tesla’s electric car battery costs are projected to come down 30% once the Gigafactory is up and running (~2017). If you don’t believe in an EV revolution yet, my bet is that you will by 2017/2018. When EV batteries get down to $100/kWh, even people working in the oil and gasmobile industries will know they’re having their Kodak moments. (Not to mention people in the utility, coal, and natural gas industries.)
Looks like our buddy Bob Tregilus was on the money when he scoped out the Project Tiger site.
Image Credits: Gigafactory visualization by Tesla Motors | Reno sunset by erin m (CC BY-NC 2.0 license)
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