Tesla plant in Germany to return to full operation on Wednesday

According to experts, it will take Tesla less than a day to restart production at the plant. The German Handelsblatt writes that everything should be back up and running by Wednesday. The carmaker initially said that production would have to be suspended until the end of this week.

The power came back on Monday night at around 9:30 p.m. local time after an arson attack on a nearby electricity pole last week caused a blackout in the company and surrounding municipalities. You can read our detailed overview here. Energy supplier Edis has been working in three-shifts over the past few days to reconnect Tesla to the grid.

The carmaker initially assumed that it would suffer financial losses in the nine-digit range because of the attack. However, the blackout will cost Tesla about 400 million euros, so about half of what was expected. According to the Handelblatt, plant manager Andre Thierig had calculated with a much longer production stop.

The figure is calculated by considering that Tesla manufactures around 6,000 cars in Grünheide every week. If one only uses the base price for a Model Y of approximately 45,000 euros as a benchmark, Tesla lost 270 million euros in sales in one week. The disruption to the supply chain also results in additional costs. According to a report by Manager Magazin, trucks were already queuing outside the factory at the end of last week.

In the meantime, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office – the highest criminal prosecution authority in Germany – has taken over the case. A spokeswoman told the Associated Press that there was initial suspicion that a terrorist organisation was involved. Initially, the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt (Oder) took over the investigation into anti-constitutional sabotage, disruption of public businesses and arson.

Resistance to expansion plans

Since Thursday, environmental activists have occupied part of the forest, which will be cleared if the plant area is expanded. It has been clear for at least three weeks that Tesla is facing resistance to the plans to expand its factory. In mid-February, the citizens of Grünheide rejected an expansion of the factory site by a majority vote.

Tesla wants to build a freight depot, warehouses and a company daycare centre on an additional 170 hectares alongside the existing 300-hectare factory site. The plans were made public in 2022. The referendum focussed on these new areas, but Tesla also wants to expand the plant on the existing factory site. However, the latter was explicitly not put to the vote.

In February, precisely what would happen after the vote was still unclear. According to media reports, the vote is not legally binding. Still, Grünheide’s mayor, Arne Christiani, said that the rejected development plan would no longer be presented to the municipal representatives in its current form. City representatives will again meet on 14 March and 16 May. In addition, the state parliament’s finance committee would have to approve the sale of the land by Brandenburg’s state forestry organisation.

As reported, Tesla wants to double its production capacity in Grünheide from 500,000 units to one million EVs per year and, according to Brandenburg’s Ministry of the Environment, is also planning to “increase battery storage production capacity from the current 50 to 100 gigawatt-hours per year in the future.” The latter also includes the production of battery cells.

Update 13 March 2024

After just over a week, the Tesla plant in Grünheide, Brandenburg, is back up and running. This was reported to rbb this morning by the head of the works council. “The machines have been checked and safely started up so that the early shift can start again,” she said verbatim.

handelblatt.com (in German), rbb24.de (update in German)