This article is adapted from the business magazine Capital and is available here for ten days. Afterwards it will only be available to read at www.capital.de. Like stern, Capital belongs to RTL Deutschland.
The arson attack on an electricity pylon that has paralyzed the Tesla factory in Grünheide since Tuesday was, according to all we know, not a particularly sophisticated act. But the consequences are serious: according to plant manager André Thierig, the production downtime could cost a high three-digit million sum and last at least five days. The company is now saying that production in Grünheide will only be able to start up again at the end of next week. This makes the damage even greater.
In principle, says car production specialist Heiko Weber, such an attack could affect every car manufacturer in Europe. “If there is a power outage of this magnitude, I don’t know of any manufacturer who is prepared for it,” he says. And Weber knows the production systems of the major car manufacturers in detail: he is responsible, among other things, for production and supply chains at the consulting firm Berylls, which specializes in car companies.
According to Weber, the fact that the car industry is unprotected applies not only to the power supply, but also to telecommunications networks or water pipes, for example: “An attack on the infrastructural supply can seriously affect any car factory and paralyze it.” The lack of protection is not a sign of naivety on the part of the industry, says Weber. Tesla also probably, as is usual in the industry, calculated all the risks before the company started the plant. But it is simply not affordable for a car manufacturer to have its own power plant on site in case the power supply collapses. And with an emergency power supply below the size of a power plant, the immense energy hunger of a car factory would not be able to be satisfied. It is as large as the needs of a large city. In a certain respect, the VW Group is an exception, as it traditionally operates two of its own coal-fired power plants at its headquarters in Wolfsburg and therefore has a certain amount of control over the energy supply. Otherwise, the manufacturers’ systems can only absorb temporary voltage fluctuations, but nothing more.
The targeted attack by extremists on Tesla increases the urgency of a political issue: How can the state and network operators secure critical infrastructure against attacks? There have been attacks in the past, for example on Deutsche Bahn lines and tracks. But the fact that a large industrial facility is being knocked out by criminals like the Tesla factory is now is a new phenomenon. In principle, the attack on the outskirts of Berlin could easily be repeated at other industrial locations – regardless of whether politically motivated terrorists, secret services, blackmailers or others were behind it.
In a car factory, the consequences of a power failure are always serious, as Berylls expert Weber explains. IT systems can usually be restarted without any complications when the power flows again. But the hardware – especially the robots – are much more difficult to get up and running again if they are stopped abruptly in the middle of production. “What really takes time is getting stuck production robots in the process back up and running again,” says Weber. The half-finished parts of each individual system would have to be removed, the robots would have to be retracted and their settings checked as in a production start-up.
The partially finished parts and cars that are pulled out of the robots would probably have to be largely disposed of. “I assume that there are tens of bodies rejected at Tesla,” says Weber. Particularly in the shell construction, but also in assembly, the partially produced pieces could hardly be returned to production. Robots weld (a bodyshell has around 6,000 welding points), they rivet, glue, insert and are therefore omnipresent in every car factory. The plant’s maintenance workers and system installers have to laboriously get them all up and running again. “They are busy with this for at least a day,” says Weber.
This also makes the high costs mentioned by plant manager Thierig realistic. The lengthy restoration of production is not the most important factor, but of course the loss of production. Thierig’s calculation is apparently based on 1,000 Tesla Model Ys normally produced in Grünheide, which, according to industry sources, seems quite exaggerated. But if you stuck with it and only set a contribution margin of 20,000 euros per vehicle, then there would be a loss of 20 million euros per production day – just for the failures.
One possibility would be for the manufacturer to try to take recourse from the energy supplier – but this depends on the individual contract structure between the factory and the supplier. Production expert Weber believes that the incident at Grünheide will alarm all manufacturers: “One or two production directors will certainly ask their leading employees: ‘What if this happens to us?’ The answer would then probably be: The car manufacturer couldn’t do much about it.
