Batteries, this is what General Motors and Samsung will do thanks to US state funds
General Motors and Samsung to invest 3 billion dollars for a battery factory in the United States. Thanks to the subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act, but Biden's visit to South Korea also contributed. All the details
US automaker General Motors and South Korean electronics company Samsung SDI are to build an electric vehicle battery plant worth more than $3 billion in Indiana in the eastern United States. The two companies had announced their intention last April, but had not indicated a specific location.
ALL DATA FROM GENERAL MOTORS-SAMSUNG BATTERY FACTORY
The plant will be built near New Carlisle, should start operating in 2026 and allow the creation of 1,700 jobs. The plant will be dedicated to the production of high-density nickel prismatic cells and cylindrical cells, with an annual capacity of 30 gigawatt hours.
THE BILLIONAIRE LOAN TO THE GM-LG JOINT VENTURE
In late 2022, the US Department of Energy granted a $2.5 billion loan to Energy Ultium Cells, the joint venture between General Motors and another South Korean battery company, LG Energy Solution. The two companies are building a $2.6 billion battery plant in Michigan, scheduled to open in 2024.
ALL PLANS OF GENERAL MOTORS ON BATTERIES AND ELECTRIC CARS
General Motors, therefore, will have four battery factories in the United States: one in Michigan, in fact; one in Indiana; one in Ohio; one in Tennessee.
The automaker expects to produce 400,000 electric vehicles in North America from 2022 to 2024, and to increase its regional manufacturing capacity to one million units per year in 2025: for this, it is considering the idea of building at least two more dedicated plants .
THE ROLE OF BIDEN
Investments in battery manufacturing are favored by the Inflation Reduction Act, the law to stimulate US manufacturing of clean energy technologies worth 369 billion dollars. The Inflation Reduction Act gives companies a tax credit of $35 per kilowatt-hour for each battery cell made in the United States, reducing their manufacturing costs by a third. Last year — the law only went into effect in mid-August 2022 — the country received more than $73 billion in EV battery plant investments, according to data from Atlas Public Policy.
In addition to the incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, the visit of President Joe Biden to South Korea last year also contributed to the investments of Samsung and LG in the American territory. A visit designed precisely to strengthen relations between Washington and Seoul and to convince the Asian ally to participate in the technological competition against China, which dominates the battery market: it is worth 66 percent of the global production capacity of battery cells.
– Read also: Will South Korea win the electric car race?
The United States has pressured another Samsung group company – Samsung Electronics, which specializes in semiconductors – to limit its activities in order to prevent Beijing from gaining access to microchip technologies.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/general-motors-samsung-fabbrica-batterie/ on Wed, 14 Jun 2023 06:03:36 +0000.