Archive for April 9th, 2020

Protest against Berlin Tesla Gigafactory (update)

Thursday, April 9th, 2020

Tim and me hereby protest against the current plans to build a car gigafactory in Berlin’s vicinity as it poses a too big threat to Berlin’s water supply. There had been massive droughts in the last two years in Brandenburg and the factory is sought to use up as much water as over 75 000 people (for estimation: approx. the amount of people who arrived during the refugee crises in Berlin). Apart from this it is thought to be partially built into a high degree water protection area. We are joined in this protest among others by Nora and Theresa Lantez (website) who live much closer to the envisaged plant and for whom the impact on their living environment would be very direct and rather destructive. Here you can see Theresa dancing:
Theresa Lantez in Bernau.

update Sept.6, 2021: According to the public plans given by Tesla all of the buildings will be built into water protection zones. Moreover the plant site is surrounded by a special european protection zone the Natura 2000 zones. According to my counting the chemicals in the factory exceed by far the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. In the town hall meeting a representative of the Tesla factory answered that the allowed limits are not exceeded, if one counts each processing unit as a kind of “separate factory” (in german: Aufteilung in Anlagen), because in this way the volumes and weights of hazardous substances of each “Anlage” stay below the limits.
There are descriptions of what can be seen as a separate “Anlage” in the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. I am not a law person but it appears to me pretty clear that the argumentation of Tesla is simply wrong.

Since the town hall meeting in 2020 things got worse, because Tesla now wants to set up a battery factory as well, where alone the cathode material exceeds limits by about a factor of 20 and the public town hall meetings for the new plans were cancelled.