The Biden administration gave details Monday on a new effort to boost the country’s electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity.
The plan, funded through Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, provides $3.1 billion in grants to companies building new and retrofitting existing lithium battery production and recycling facilities. The law included $7 billion in total for improving battery supply chains, and Monday’s action follows an April invocation of the Defense Production Act aimed at boosting domestic production of lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese, key battery components.
Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Biden’s infrastructure coordinator, said during a Monday briefing that the funding “will help boost domestic battery manufacturing, make our country more secure, and spur the creation of good-paying jobs.”
“Our electric future will be made in America,” he claimed. “That is exactly what ‘Building a Better America’ looks like.”
White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy told reporters that the administration is ensuring “that the United States is not just a world leader in making batteries” and “innovating the advanced battery technologies that we need in the future … insulating the country from global supply disruptions.”
“This funding announcement will punch above its weight in not only accelerating the transition to a clean transportation future but also in securing one of the most important supply chains in the U.S. economy,” National Economic Council Director Brian Deese added. “This is an effort to try to help seed dozens of companies across the United States to build capacity in a way that we have not done in decades, and it’s designed to do so in a way that produces the kinds of outcomes that we want from a public-private partnership: building in all parts of the country, helping to prioritize small and medium companies and manufacturers, not just large incumbents, and helping make sure that communities that have been too often left out of these types of industrial expansions have an opportunity to participate and benefit.”
Dave Howell of the Department of Energy estimated that the tranche of funding could be split into as many as 30 grants, with an expected minimum investment of $50 million per project, and senior administration officials explicitly said the plan will help to meet Biden’s goal of converting 50% of all cars to electric vehicles by 2030, all while ending U.S. reliance on “unreliable” offshore suppliers, such as China.
“We have been working with the individual states, not just individual companies, to identify and make these grants available,” McCarthy added. “We fully expect it will go to U.S. companies as well as workers.”
She added that there “are opportunities to expand innovation and supply chains in Michigan, which we already know are available, and we can help our automakers to increase their growing demand for cleaner and safer vehicles that way.”
“Also, we’re looking at opportunities in Nevada, which is really an innovative economy at the forefront of battery manufacturing and recycling, which is going to be important over time,” McCarthy concluded. “It will reduce the need for new extraction that will create that circular economy we’re looking for, so that’s the intent.”
