The Bay Area Air Quality Management District has accused Tesla’s Fremont plant of potentially emitting thousands of tons of illegal air pollutants in recent years and is seeking an order to force the company to take measures to stop.
The company has racked up 112 notices of violations since 2019 for a variety of reasons, resulting in as much as 750 pounds of unmitigated air pollution per violation. The violations were frequent, recurring, and have negative impacts on health and the environment, the Air District’s executive director Philip Fine said on Thursday.
Fine said he was asking the air district’s independent enforcement arm, its hearing board, to issue an abatement order to have a third party evaluate mitigation options and compel the company to follow an abatement plan.
“The Air District is seeking this order to compel Tesla to address numerous recurring emissions violations at their Fremont facility paint shops,” Fine said. “Tesla’s repeated failure to comply with air quality regulations is unacceptable and increases the risk to public health.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the Air District’s proposed action, which will be considered during a public meeting of the Air Quality Management District once a hearing date is set. Updates on the hearing can be found on the district’s website, and the public can sign up to receive automatic updates.
The Fremont plant’s paint shop is the target of the abatement order. It has been the source of many of the violations the Air District issued for releasing toxic emissions and precursor chemicals directly into the atmosphere. The Air District said the paint shop’s thermal oxidizer, which treats harmful pollutants and converts them to safer emissions before being released, is often broken. Even when it is sometimes working, the abatement device is shut down by operators because other equipment is malfunctioning.
Regulators said the violations were foreseeable and could be prevented. The air district is asking the hearing board to compel the company to address the problems through a two-step process.
The first would be to have the company hire a third-party consultant to make recommendations on solutions and Tesla would then be required to form an implementation plan filed with the hearing board. The second step would be to implement the plan.
The factory, located on Fremont Boulevard just east of Interstate 880, was the company’s first, and produced the first Tesla Model S in 2012. It currently produces Tesla’s Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y.
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