The Ford Electric Vehicle and Battery Project in Georgia: Where are the biggest economic development announcements in the United States?” Tom Taylor, an analyst for Atlas
The battery plant will be in addition to plants in Kentucky and Tennessee that Ford announced in 2021. Ford is building those plants with SK Innovations, a company based in South Korea. Ford plans to have two million electric vehicles on the road by the late 20th century.
Did you hear about the one from KORE Power? Samsung and Stellantis in Indiana? The Chinese project in Michigan, the Norwegian one in Georgia, the Japanese one in South Carolina?
Would you still be impressed by a billion dollars, or a $5 billion electric vehicle and battery project in Georgia? Not that one, the other one.
Most of the batteries from Ford come from SK Innovation. By making its own batteries in the US, Ford thinks it can avoid some of the conflicts that arise from importing batteries overseas. Ensuring that its EVs qualify for the IRA’s federal EV tax credit, requires that vehicles and batteries be manufactured in North America. We don’t know how the Treasury Department will interpret the IRA battery sourcing requirements, which discourage dealings with “foreign entities of concern.”
“It helps us with logistics cost, it helps us with material costs,” Volkswagen of America’s then-president Scott Keogh told NPR last January about moving production to the United States. “It’ll be a dramatic, dramatic, dramatic help having the supply chain localized, having the car here and, frankly, just having enough production slots.”
In the last year, the company has opened a new electric assembly line at its Chattanooga plant (cost of conversion: $800 million), with batteries sourced from a new SKI plant located a few hours away in Georgia (price tag: $2.6 billion).
The “battery belt” of new U.S. projects in the Southeast has earned the region the nickname. But Tom Taylor, an analyst with Atlas, says the trend is geographically wider than that.
“We’ve seen announcements… all over the country, and not just announcements, but really big announcements,” he says. “Some of the largest, if not the largest, economic development projects in the state’s history are in some states.”
The Impact of State and Local Subsidies on Electric Vehicle Production at GM-Newton and the Clean Energy Economy in the U.S.
Mary Barra had to defend the slow pace of production at a recent call with investors, even though GM had opened a new battery plant.
“Let’s step back and recognize that the Ohio plant is the size of 30 football fields, and it will employ over 1,000 people,” she said. It’s taken more than expected to make sure we have all our people there and trained.
A big chunk of the money is footed by the taxpayers, which is particularly concerning to some critics.
Good Jobs reported that electric vehicle factories and battery factories got over $13 billion in state and local subsidies this year. The size of the subsidies and the lack of transparency have been criticized.
The Climate bill that passed this summer included hefty incentives for US based electric vehicle manufacturing, which was recorded by Atlas.
The company’s investment in Lithium Americas is part of the company’s efforts to lock-up the supply of raw materials it will need to convert from traditional gasoline powered cars to electric vehicles. The deal with the Americas will not supply the company with any product until 2026, but Jacobson stated that they have already achieved all they need.
GM Semi-Inclusive Vehicle Production and Second-Phase EBITDA in the Fourth & Final Quarter, Revised
GM earned $3 billion, or $2.12 a share, for the fourth quarter, which was better than estimates of $1.79 a share from Refinitiv and up from the prior year’s earnings of $1.35 a share. The adjusted income went up to $11 billion from the previous record of $10.4 billion, a rise of 22%.
There was no surprise that there was increasing competition in the EV space. Our customers are saying we are priced well because of the demand.
A fraction of its overall vehicle output is expected to be built by GM this year. The number of vehicles it sold was down because of a shortage of parts that were needed for all the vehicles.
The company expects to reduce its staff in the coming years as it attempts to cut $2 billion in costs over the next two years. But unlike a number of major companies that have announced layoffs in recent months, company officials stressed GM would not be shrinking through layoffs. attrition would handle the reduction.
GM has 167,000 employees globally, with 124,000 in North America. That includes more than 42,000 members of the United Auto Workers union. Those workers will get profit sharing bonuses of an average of $12,750 for the year, up nearly 25% from the $10,250 they received a year earlier.
The Michigan Electric Vehicle Factory: LFP Lithium Ferrophosphate Batteries for a Low-Cost, Low-Energy EV
Ford’s decision to build in Michigan a battery plant will provide it with more federal tax credits for electric vehicles and will help it sell more of them.
The Inflation ReductionAct (IRA) legislation was passed in August to restructure how EV tax credits are allowed. Consumers buying electric vehicles will be eligible for tax credits of varying amounts depending on whether the vehicle itself and its batteries and battery components are manufactured in the US or not.
“I think the IRA was incredibly important for us and, frankly, it did what it was intended to do,” she said. It allowed the United States to capture 2,500 fantastic technical jobs and all the indirect jobs that go with it.
The plant will make lithium iron phosphate batteries, better known as LFP (lithium ferro-phosphate), batteries. This is a battery that uses no nickel or cobalt because it can be difficult to extract them from the earth.
LFP batteries charge faster and last longer when frequently charged to their full capacity than the NCM, or nickel, cobalt and manganese, batteries currently used in Ford EVs. When pulling heavy loads, NCM batteries can store more power than other batteries, because they perform better in cold temperatures.
Most of today’s EVs use lithium-ion batteries whose cathodes use NCM chemistries. But NCM also has a lot of baggage, due mostly to cobalt, which has been called the “blood diamond of batteries” because it’s been mined in a way that’s endangered child workers and wrecked the environment in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Lisa Drake, vice president of EV industrialization at Ford model e, said during the briefing that they tolerate more frequent and faster DC fast charging. When they are charged from zero to 100 percent of the time, they do their best. And that is ideal for customers who want to drive all the way to empty and then charge quickly back to 100 percent.”
Drake explained that the addition of LFP batteries was inspired by a desire to reduce costs. “This is how we look at the recipe to create one of the lowest-cost US-produced batteries when this plant comes on line in 2026,” she said.
The automaker had a particularly bad earnings quarter this past quarter and is looking for ways to reduce costs. Jim Farley, CEO of Ford said that the company left $2 billion in profits on the table due to poor execution and long-term issues in our industrial system.
There have been rumors of a new factory for a long time. Ford originally intended to build it in a poor area of Virginia, part of a new battery plant that was planned across the South. Up to 2,500 new jobs would have been created as a result of the project. But Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor, rejected the project because of the involvement of CATL, citing the influence of China’s communist government.