Two companies attempting to set up gigawatt-scale lithium battery factories have canceled their plans for American manufacturing. KORE Power confirmed to local news that it was abandoning its 12-GWh factory plan in Buckeye, Arizona, and FREYR just revealed it would sell its ESS manufacturing site in Georgia.
KORE Power first announced its Arizona manufacturing plans in 2021. The goal was to hire 3,000 people at the 1 million ft2 site to make both NMC and LFP battery cells for the EV and ESS markets. The company has U.S. intellectual property but makes its batteries through a Chinese contract manufacturer. After receiving investments from Siemens and Quanta Services, KORE planned to break ground on the Arizona site in 2023. Construction never began, and now the company is pivoting to find an already-built site to move into.
Norwegian-born FREYR chose a site in Coweta County, Georgia, to establish lithium battery cell manufacturing and was working toward a loan from the Dept. of Energy for the $1.7 billion project. The company made a surprising move in late 2024, buying Trina Solar’s panel assembly operations in Texas. FREYR is now focusing primarily on solar panel manufacturing, even dropping “Battery” from its company name. FREYR said it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell the Georgia site to an undisclosed party for $50 million, which should be finalized on Feb. 15, 2024.
I am sorry to see the harm this administration has done to the economies of Georgia and Arizona and this countries healthy direction. I am (unfortunately) happy to see it manifested in the red states that voted for him. Make America Grieve Again
Did you read the article? These events happened under Bidens admin time frame.
KORE was always up against a $5.5 billion LGES manufacturing facility in Arizona. LGES also stalled for a time and seems to be now picking up momentum to finish the Arizona plant in 2025. With changes in the Tariff 201, 301 guidance documents over the last 8 years, the dynamics of previously ‘defined’ projects may have run into problems qualifying for 45X monies depending on where their supply chains were supposed to come from. I’m thinkin’, some of these projects ran into a wall of supply chain materials that would require a whole and complete raw materials to refined materials and both CAM and AAM manufacturing lines in house that could well be $1 billion to $2 billion more to the cost of the facility.
I also see this as a ‘tell’ that the battery and energy storage industry is about to push hard to pivot to solid state batteries as soon as possible. Solid state manufacturing facilities designed from the ground up may be much more profitable than modifying old wet chemistry manufacturing lines to solid state manufacturing lines. This one concept may flesh out as companies vying for industry partners for their product runs of solid state cells over wet or slurry chemistry cells, kind of a battle between VHS vs Beta of days gone by. The LGES plant is said to be a total $5.5 billion dollar project with a total capacity of 53GWh of cells per year, both LFP BESS unit pouch batteries and 46xx cylindrical cells of some NMC chemistry for vehicles. KORE is in the unenviable position of pivoting to a different battery chemistry or staying out of the business for another say 5 years to see what happens to solid state cells and chemistries.
KORE may be telegraphing an industry pivot to the BIGs. BIG debt, BIG risks, BIG rewards or BIG failures. The final consideration is go BIG or go home.
Trump and the Republicans are all about drill baby drill so you can kiss all the new high payong renewable energy jobs goodbye!!!
Remember it was all the MAGA clan that voted for this!!!
Oil production provides high paying jobs.
Can you point to the exact high paying jobs that lithium battery assembly creates?