The gigafactory, which is crucial to Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk's ambitions to vanquish European market leader Volkswagen, was initially supposed to open last summer.
Germany's largest automaker has the upper hand in Europe, with a 25 percent share of electric vehicle (EV) sales to Tesla's 13 percent.
Brandenburg state premier Dietmar Woidke told a news briefing that the development marked "a big step into the future", adding that the Tesla plant would be a major industrial and technological driver for Germany and the region.
Around 2,600 of the plant's expected 12,000 workers have
been hired so far, unions said last month, and Tesla is in talks with numerous
parts suppliers in the region to source as much as possible locally, lowering
waiting times and costs.
Underlining the intense competition facing Tesla, Volkswagen
said on Friday it would spend about EUR 2 billion on a new factory near its
Wolfsburg headquarters to make the Trinity, the first of a new generation of
electric vehicles for the German carmaker, with construction due to start next
year.
Friday's 536-page conditional building permit for Tesla does
not mean the US-based EV pioneer can start production right away. It must first
prove that it fulfils numerous conditions, including in water use and air
pollution control.
Only then will Tesla get its long-awaited operating permit
and actually start rolling out the 500,000 battery-powered vehicles it wants to
produce each year at the new plant, located in the small community of
Gruenheide.
Another hurdle to secure the site's water supply emerged
late on Friday, when a Frankfurt Oder administrative court sided with
environmental groups who had challenged a licence given to a local water
utility to supply the Tesla site.
But the court said the procedural errors made in the
licensing decision could be remedied by the water utility, leaving open the
door for the water supply arrangement to be salvaged.
Kickstarting production in Germany would mean Tesla can
deliver its Model Y cars to European customers faster and more cheaply, after
meeting orders in Europe from its Shanghai factory in recent months as it
awaited approval for the site.
Tesla plans to show that it meets the imposed conditions
within the next two weeks, Brandenburg's environment minister Axel Vogel said,
while objections can be filed over the next month.
Tesla's next challenge will be to scale up production as
quickly as possible, which Musk said at a fair on-site in October would take
longer than building the factory.
Local environmental groups have long feared that the plant
will negatively impact local habitat. Numerous public consultations, focusing
primarily on that aspect, delayed the process, with Musk expressing irritation
on multiple occasions over German bureaucracy.
The factory, which Tesla has begun constructing under
pre-approval permits, will also include a battery plant capable of generating
more than 50 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year — outstripping European competitors.
Batteries for cars produced on-site will initially come from
China, Musk said, but he intends to reach volume production at the German
battery plant by the end of next year. © Reuters