Tesla is throwing a party on April 7 to mark the official opening of Giga Texas, its plant near Austin.after delayed approval from local officials who worried that the massive facility could deplete shrinking water resources. Elon Musk’s electric car powerhouse opens an even bigger factory tomorrow in Austin where environmentalists are similarly concerned about its impact on water in a fast-growing Texas city that’s increasingly prone to drought.
Tesla has said the Giga Texas plant, located near the Colorado River, will be among the auto industry's most water-efficient.“With respect to groundwater, the way they manage it in Texas is what’s called ‘managed depletion.’ … They're not managing for sustainability,” says Steve Box, founder and executive director of Environmental Stewardship, a local affiliate of Waterkeeper Alliance that works to protect the Colorado River Basin and aquifers in the Austin region.
Like the Austin plant, the German facility may need at least 1.4 million cubic meters of water per year. Tesla’s ability to expand production there is unclear owing to Brandenberg’s “tense” water situation, according to Wasserverband Strausberg-Erkner, the local water board. In Texas “every water supplier will be different, but almost all will have to deal with some combination of decreasing supply or increasing demand,” says John Nielsen-Gammon, professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University and the state’s climatologist. Booming Texas cities like Austin “already know about increasing demand from increasing population. It's very unlikely that climate change will have an effect as large as the effect of the growing population.
The Austin plant site was previously a sand and gravel quarry operated by Martin Marrieta that looked like “2,000 acres of craters,” Richard Suttle, an attorney for the company told Austin’s Water Oversight Committee in an August 2020 meeting. “If you’ve ever seen what sand and gravel mining does to a piece of property, it makes it look like a moonscape.”