Berlin:
In the green forest outdoors Berlin, a David and Goliath-style battle is playing out among electric carmaker Tesla and environmental campaigners who want to cease its planned “gigafactory”.
“When I saw on TV that the Tesla factory was going to be built here, I couldn’t believe it,” mentioned Steffen Schorch, driving his trusty German-produced automobile.
The 60-year-old from Erkner village in the Berlin commuter belt has come to be one of the faces of the fight against the US auto giant’s very first European factory, due to open in the Brandenburg area close to Berlin in July.
“Tesla needs far too much water, and the region does not have this water,” mentioned the environmental activist, a neighborhood representative of the Nabu ecologist campaign group.
Announced in November 2019, Tesla’s gigafactory project was warmly welcomed as an endorsement of the “Made in Germany” top quality mark — but was right away met with opposition from neighborhood residents.
Demonstrations, legal action, open letters — residents have completed all the things in their energy to delay the project, supported by highly effective environmental campaign groups Nabu and Gruene Liga.
Tesla was forced to temporarily suspend forest clearing last year just after campaigners won an injunction more than threats to the habitats of resident lizards and snakes in the course of their winter slumber.
And now they have focused their interest on water consumption — which could attain up to 3.6 million cubic metres a year, or about 30 % of the region’s readily available provide, according to the ZDF public broadcaster.
The added demand could location a massive burden on a area currently impacted by water shortages and hit by summer time droughts for the previous 3 years.
Local residents and environmentalists are also concerned about the effect on the wetlands, an critical supply of biodiversity in the area.
Tesla Street
“The water situation is bad, and will get worse,” Heiko Baschin, a spokesman for the neighbourhood association IG Freienbrink, told AFP.
Brandenburg’s atmosphere minister Axel Vogel sought to play down the challenge, saying in March that “capacity has not been exceeded for now”.
But the authorities admit that “the impact of droughts is significant” and have set up a working group to examine the challenge in the lengthy term.
The gigafactory is set to sprawl more than 300 hectares — equivalent to roughly 560 football fields — southwest of the German capital.
Tesla is aiming to create 500,000 electric cars a year at the plant, which will also be house to “the largest battery factory in the world”, according to group boss Elon Musk.
In a small more than a year and a half, swathes of coniferous forest have currently been cleared to make way for vast concrete rectangles on a red earth base, accessed by means of the currently iconic Tesla Strasse (Tesla Street).
German bureaucracy
The new web site nonetheless has only provisional building permits, but Tesla has been authorised by neighborhood officials to commence work at its personal threat.
Final approval depends on an assessment of the project’s environmental effect — like the challenge of water.
In theory, if approval is not granted, Tesla will have to dismantle the complete complicated at its personal expense.
But “pressure is being exerted (on the regulatory authorities), linked to Tesla’s significant investment”, Gruene Liga’s Michael Greschow told AFP.
In early April, Tesla mentioned it was “irritated” by the slow pace of German bureaucracy, calling for exceptions to the guidelines for projects that enable the atmosphere.
Economy Minister Peter Altmaier agreed in April that his government “had not done enough” to cut down bureaucracy, lauding the gigafactory as a “very important project”.
Despite Germany’s reputation for efficiency, significant infrastructure projects are usually held up by bureaucracy criticised as excessive by the enterprise neighborhood.
Among the most embarrassing examples are Berlin’s new airport which opened last October just after an eight-year delay and Stuttgart’s new train station, which has been beneath building because 2010.
Brandenburg’s economy minister, Joerg Steinbach, raised the possibility in February that the Tesla factory could be delayed beyond its July planned opening for the exact same purpose.
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