Colloquially, one would say about what the car manufacturer Tesla is currently experiencing in Grünheide, Brandenburg: It’s not working. Over the past ten days, a wave of anger has built up around the US company’s plant, which reached a temporary climax this Friday. At ten o’clock the members of the Strausberg-Erkner Water Association (WSE) met for an extraordinary meeting, agenda item 3, non-public part: Should the WSE continue to collect Tesla’s wastewater?
The reason is the limit values for phosphorus and nitrogen in the factory’s dirty water, which are regularly exceeded. But while the WSE complains about this, the Berlin waterworks, which, among other things, treat the wastewater for the WSE, do not currently see any problem. Tesla responded to the extraordinary meeting with an incendiary letter to the WSE. “You are aware that stopping the discharge of the Gigafactory’s wastewater would lead to a stop in the Gigafactory’s production,” he quoted Daily Mirror from it.
The cabal over wastewater is the third setback that US billionaire Elon Musk’s company has had to accept in a very short time. On Tuesday last week, a majority of Grünheide residents had already spoken out against Tesla’s expansion. The company had planned to develop additional land and to clear around a hundred hectares of pine forest. The result of the vote is not binding for the community; However, Mayor Arne Christiani has announced that he will respect the residents’ vote and will not submit the development plan to the local council as planned.
“Clean cars are a dirty lie,” the posters say
On the night of this Thursday, another blow came for Tesla: around 80 activists from the “Stop Tesla” and “Robin Wood” initiatives occupied the forest on the suspected building site. With the campaign they want to ensure that the residents’ decision is actually taken seriously, they say. And that they came to stay. “Water is a human right,” reads the posters in the pine forest. Or: “Clean cars are a dirty lie.”
The construction of the camp looks professional, as if you already had experience building tree houses. There are around ten on Friday. The police have announced that they will tolerate the occupation until March 15th, perhaps longer. The fence to Tesla’s so-called gigafactory runs just a few hundred meters away. He is guarded by two impassive-looking police officers. “This policy is driving people into the arms of the AfD,” says Manuela Hoyer from the Citizens’ Initiative Grünheide https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/.”Everything was decided over the people’s heads.”
In Grünheide in Brandenburg they are protesting against Tesla.
(Photo: Patrick Pleul/dpa)
There had been repeated resistance to the fourth gigafactory – Tesla’s first production site in Europe. Nevertheless, with the help of the Brandenburg state government, the company managed to build the plant southeast of Berlin in just two years. 12,500 employees there now produce around 300,000 electric cars every year. A year after the opening in March 2022, Brandenburg’s Economics Minister Jörg Steinbach celebrated the production site as a stroke of luck for the state. “85 to 90 percent” of the population still welcomed “Tesla,” said the SPD politician at the time.
The Americans were already allowed to start building without final approval
The fact that the mood has now changed so much also has to do with the actions of the Brandenburg government. By building the plant, she wanted to demonstrate how fast the country’s bureaucracy can be. The company was allowed to build without final approval, at its own risk: if approval was not granted, Tesla would have had to restore the original condition.
Tesla also intends to further expand its factory; in the medium term, one million cars will be produced here every year. The expansion of the factory area is largely independent of this; according to Tesla, warehouses, a company kindergarten and its own train station should be built on the site now occupied. Too much for some residents in Grünheide.
Martin Hildebrandt sits at one of the many lakes in the community and reads a book. He moved here from Berlin with his family in 2012. He says he bought a paddle board: “I can go out on the lake and have peace and quiet.” Since Tesla arrived, the beaches have become far too crowded. That’s why he ticked “No” when voting to expand the Tesla site. Now he is happy about the occupation of the forest. “I have no confidence that politicians will stick to the vote,” he says. Tesla would primarily give jobs to foreign workers; in any case, he doesn’t know anyone who works at Tesla.
Such individual opinions seem to be consolidating more and more into currents. Carsten Schneider, Social Democrat and Federal Government Commissioner for the East, told the dpa on Friday: “In the past, practically every major project was welcomed as long as it brought jobs. Now there is occasional resistance. We have to take that into account when planning in the future.”
That’s exactly what Tesla hadn’t done for a long time. The company seemed like a black box. This was surprising because Tesla does take the concerns of critics into consideration. In collaboration with environmentalists, the company is reforesting large areas of forests elsewhere to compensate for deforestation. In addition, the factory says it is able to recycle all of the water needed for production.
Curiously, the dispute with the Strausberg-Erkner water association (WSE) arose for precisely this reason. The contract, including the limit values, was concluded when Tesla also diverted water from production. It is now mainly sanitary wastewater from toilets and kitchens that arrives at the WSE. Phosphorus and nitrogen are normal components there; However, since less wastewater arrives overall, the concentration is higher than originally agreed.
The company is now increasingly seeking contact with the population. Tesla tried to win the people of Grünheid over to its expansion plans through a kind of roadshow through the community. “We fully respect the referendum,” said Tesla, commenting on its defeat in the vote in mid-February. It is a good opportunity to “double our work with the community and everyone involved.”
There was at least the all-clear on the wastewater issue on Friday afternoon. The WSE’s plan to lock out Tesla was apparently not voted on at the meeting. Instead, the association’s chairman, Henryk Pilz, resigned with the comment: “The lobbyists have won.” The WSE had long criticized Tesla’s settlement because of water consumption.