Is California too green for Tesla's 'gigafactory'?
When Palo Alto-based Tesla Motors announced plans to build a $5-billion battery "gigafactory," it listed four states as possible homes — none of them California. Since then, feverish wooing by Gov. Jerry Brown's administration and some state lawmakers has led Tesla to consider building the factory here, but at least two hurdles remain, both of them related to the state's efforts to protect the environment. It would be no small irony if Tesla turned up its nose at California, where it sells a third of its electric cars, because the state proved to be too green.
States covet manufacturers because they tend to pay employees well and can create a slew of additional jobs at the companies that supply them with parts and raw materials. And Tesla's 6,500-employee battery plant, which it wants to have up and running by 2017, comes at a time when manufacturers are doing more with fewer workers and big new factories are scarce.
Tesla's assembly lines are in Fremont, so you might think California would have the inside track for the battery plant. One predictable hurdle, though, is the California Environmental Quality Act, which subjects any major land-development proposal to a tough and potentially drawn-out review. This page has joined the chorus of critics who've urged lawmakers to speed those reviews and stop the anti-competitive gamesmanship that the act enables, to no avail. In the absence of such reforms, the Brown administration and top lawmakers are poised to offer Tesla essentially the same streamlining the Legislature approved in 2011 for large, job-creating projects in urban areas. Under that law, which expires in January, once a developer has completed the required environmental impact report, any legal challenges go straight to the Court of Appeal and must be decided within six months.
Streamlining the CEQA reviews should be enough of an accommodation, given that Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has said he's just trying to speed up the process, not exempt the factory from environmental mandates. Not that he could say anything else; it would be profoundly hypocritical for Tesla, which bills itself as part of the solution to global warming, to build a pollution-spewing battery factory. But the company is said to be pressing for even greater concessions that would allow it to build the plant before the environmental impact studies were completed, then mitigate any environmental problems it discovers later. That would set a dangerous precedent.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-tesla-gigafactory-chase-20140826-story.html
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