It was a huge year for electric vehicle battery plants in the US, to the tune of $73 billion.
09 February 2023 at 8:44 ET
Electric vehicles currently make up only about 6 percent of new vehicle sales in the U.S., but a major industry shift toward battery projects suggests that number could soar in the coming years. Tesla’s market dominance is causing other automakers to make big investments in car batteries, and it’s hard to keep track of new EV battery projects starting in the coming years.
Above: A Tesla Model 3 and other electric cars recharge at a charging station (Image: Kindel Media / Pexels).
New research from think tank Atlas Public Policy shows more than $128 billion in announced U.S. investments in electric vehicles, battery plants and battery recycling projects in recent years, as detailed in a report by NPR. In 2022 alone, the data shows more than $73 billion in planned projects, representing three times more funding than in 2021.
Several automakers are debuting EV-related projects in the US, including legacy names like Ford, General Motors and German powerhouse Volkswagen, to name a few. These projects will require tons of electric vehicle batteries in the coming years, which also represent a huge market that manufacturers and suppliers are ready to jump into.
Tesla currently has US Gigafactories in Fremont, California, Sparks, Nevada and Austin, Texas, and the company may soon announce a new US plant. The electric car maker also has a photovoltaic cell factory in Buffalo, New York, and has battery supply agreements with several manufacturers, most notably Panasonic.
About 90 percent of electric vehicle battery production is currently based in China, and US auto leaders have been issuing warnings about the issue for the past two years. In an interview last year, former Volkswagen of America president Scott Keogh highlighted some other benefits of moving production to the US.
“It helps us with logistics costs, it helps us with material costs,” Keogh said last January in the interview with NPR. “It’s going to be a dramatic, dramatic, dramatic help to have the supply chain localized, to have the car here and, frankly, to have enough production space.”
Over the past year, the company’s Chattanooga, Tenn., plant added an $800 million electric assembly line, and the factory is sourcing its batteries from a new SKI plant in Georgia at a of 2.6 billion dollars, as reported. NPR.
Atlas analyst Tom Taylor says the new battery plant projects will create more than 150,000 direct jobs, although the plants will take time to get up and running.
“We’ve seen ads … all over the country, and not just ads, but really big ads. In some states [these are] some of the largest, if not the largest, economic development projects in the history of the state,” Taylor said.
“It’s a reasonable assumption that this number will continue to rise.”
Source: NPR
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