EV Battery Manufacturing Could Boom In The U.S. This Year
Slowly but surely, the sales of electric vehicles are growing around the world. From China to Europe, and even the United States, deliveries of battery-powered cars and trucks are increasing, though the rate of growth is far different depending on the market. EVs have proven to be far more popular in China than in the U.S., though this trepidation on the part of American motorists has not stopped automakers and supplier companies from making gargantuan investments in electric vehicles, and battery factories, a passel of which is expected to come online in 2025.
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A U.S. Battery-Manufacturing Boom
Toyota's Current Lithium-Ion Battery in a factory.
According to a report from Inside Climate News, a whopping 10 new electric vehicle battery factories are expected to open in the U.S. this year. That includes plants from automakers like Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Stellantis, and Toyota, but supplier companies are in on the action, too. Panasonic, Samsung, and SK On are also expected to christen new factories in 2025.
If all those production facilities come online, it’s estimated by analysis firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence that the U.S. will have enough capacity to manufacture some 421.5 gigawatt-hours of electric vehicle batteries per year. That represents a whopping 90 percent increase from late 2024.
Of course, batteries are the heart and soul of any EV, the single most expensive part of an electric vehicle, so additional manufacturing capacity to build these energy-storage systems is great news. But like subsisting exclusively on birthday cake, this could be too much of a good thing. Will enough Americans make the switch to EVs to support all that manufacturing capacity? That is the million-dollar question, or, rather, the multi-billion-dollar query given the staggering sums of money invested in the ongoing EV transition.
Major Uncertainty On The Horizon
Ford
In the U.S. right now, there’s enormous uncertainty around electric vehicles. Whether the new Trump administration will continue supporting public charging networks or allow EV subsidies is up in the air, everything could change going forward. According to Evan Hartley, battery industry analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, however, it’s too late to hit the brakes with many of these new manufacturing plants since they’re basically already built. “You can’t stop it, and the momentum is there. And most of them are in Republican states. It’s difficult to take away many thousands of jobs promised to your key voter base,” he said in the Inside Climate News article.
Nonetheless, some manufacturers are canceling various expansion projects. Largely because a federal loan has not been finalized, an Idaho-based firm called Kore Power recently nixed a $1.2 billion plan to build a new battery factory Buckeye, Arizona. Similarly, another firm named Freyr has made a major pivot. Initially, they planned to build a new battery factory in Georgia, one worth about $2.6 billion, but instead they’re now focusing on manufacturing solar panels in Texas.
According to Hartly, these strategy changes Kore Power and Freyr are making are not because of the looming battery glut in the U.S., rather this is because they’re startups, and there’s always a lot of volatility getting a new business off the ground. “There are a number of roadblocks that you encounter as a battery startup that relate to the actual technical activity involved in making batteries,” he said in the article, “the kind of scale at which you have to [build] or the scale and precision involved in the manufacturing process, and the fact that it’s difficult to consistently make high-quality products.” Basically, manufacturing ain’t easy, and it’s especially challenging to make delicate batteries for electric vehicles.
It remains to be seen if all 10 of those new manufacturing plants will open in the U.S. this year. Whether production meets the theoretical 421.5 gWh of capacity is a mystery as well. It seems, however, that if American drivers are ready to go electric, automakers will have no shortage of batteries for as many EVs as people will buy.
