By our count, half of the batteries will be manufactured at factories that have committed to sourcing at least 50% of their electricity demand from renewables by 2030. Even better, these commitments are concentrated in regions of the United States where investments have lagged.
Let’s start with some good news.
Published on April 2, 2024, by The Conversation.
With my students at Wellesley College, I’ve been tracking the boom in investments in clean energy manufacturing and how those projects— including battery, solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing and their supply chains—map onto the nation’s electricity grid.
Panasonic’s new $4 billion battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, is designed to be a model of sustainability—it’s an all-electric factory with no smokestack. When finished, it will cover the size of 48 football fields, employ 4,000 people, and produce enough advanced batteries to supply half a million electric cars per year.
Manufacturing all of these batteries and charging all of these electric vehicles is going to put a lot more demand on the power grid. But that isn’t an argument against EVs. Anything that plugs into the grid, whether it is an EV or the factory that manufacturers its batteries, gets cleaner as more renewable energy sources come online.
In January, Hawaii replaced its last coal-fired power plant with an advanced battery system. It won’t be long before that starts to happen in Tennessee, Texas, and Kansas, too.
As investments in a clean energy future accelerate, the United States will need to reengineer much of its power grid to run on more and more renewables and, simultaneously, electrify everything from cars to factories to homes.
Our tracking found that three-fourths of the battery manufacturing capacity is locating in states with lower-than-average renewable electricity generation today. And in almost all of those places, more demand will drive higher marginal emissions, because that extra power almost always comes from fossil fuels.
This transition is already happening. Although natural gas dominates electricity generation, in 2023 renewables supplied more electricity than coal for the first time in U.S. history. The government forecasts that in 2024, 96% of new electricity generating capacity added to the grid would be fossil fuel-free, including batteries. These trends are accelerating, thanks to the incentives for clean energy deployment included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Looking ahead
Some companies are already taking action. Tesla is building the world’s largest solar array on the roof of its Texas factory. LG has committed to sourcing 100% renewable solar and hydroelectricity for its new cathode factory in Tennessee. And Panasonic is taking steps to reach net-zero emissions for all of its factories, including the new one in Kansas, by 2030.
That means investing in modernizing, expanding, and decarbonizing the electric grid is as important as building new factories or shifting to electric cars.
But there’s a catch, and it’s a big one.
The big lesson here is that the challenge in Kansas is not the battery factory—it is the increasingly antiquated electricity grid.
The challenge: These battery factories, and the electric vehicles they equip, are going to require a lot of electricity.
Producing enough battery cells to store 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity—enough for 2 to 4 miles of range in an EV—requires about 30 kWh of manufacturing energy, according to a recent study.
The Kansas battery plant highlights the challenges ahead as the United States scales up production of clean energy technologies and weans itself off fossil fuels. It also illustrates the potential for this industry to accelerate the transition to renewable energy nationwide.
The clean tech manufacturing boom
However, we have also been tracking which battery companies are committing to powering their manufacturing operations with renewable electricity. The data point to a cleaner future.
