In Schwarzheide in Brandenburg, just about 100 miles south of Tesla's emerging German Gigafactory Giga Berlin, preparations are currently underway for a work that should actually have earned the prefix Giga. The developer behind this is not Tesla, but the German chemical company BASF. Yet, there could still be a connection between the two, because in Schwarzheide cathode materials for battery cells are to be produced, and at Tesla may well start purchasing EV batteries from BASF.
In any case, the BASF project is making progress: it has just received a funding notification of 175 million euros from the federal government and the state of Brandenburg.
In a press release, Brandenburg's Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke spoke of a key investment in the future of Europe's electric cars.
70 percent of the funding comes from the federal government and 30 percent from the state and a smaller part is also to flow into the BASF plant in Ludwigshafen. In Schwarzheide in Brandenburg, BASF is building production facilities for cathode material for the battery cells of electric cars and stationary batteries. The money from the federal government is part of the European battery project IPCEI 1, in the second edition of which Tesla should also be involved.
Armen Hareyan is the founder and the Editor in Chief of Torque News. He founded TorqueNews.com in 2010, which since then has been publishing expert news and analysis about the automotive industry. He can be reached at Torque News Twitter, Facebok, Linkedin and Youtube.
