The Department of Energy announced a $2 billion loan Thursday to help a Nevada company increase production of critical battery components for electric vehicles.
The company, Redwood Materials, plans to use the loan to expand a manufacturing campus near Reno, Nevada, where it makes some of the components from new and recycled sources. The company was founded by JB Straubel, a former top executive at Tesla, and has partnerships with Panasonic, Ford Motor, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.
Once construction is complete, Redwood aims to produce enough battery materials at the Nevada campus to support the production of more than one million electric vehicles annually. The loan will help create about 3,400 construction jobs, Redwood and the Department of Energy said. The company said it expected about 1,600 full-time employees to work on the campus when it was completed.
The announcement was the department’s latest loan to support domestic battery manufacturing, as the Biden administration seeks to bring more of the electric vehicle supply chain to the United States and reduce reliance on China. Last month, the department said that lend $700 million to support a mining project in Nevada. In December, the department announced a $2.5 billion loan for Ultium Cells, a battery manufacturing joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution.
During the Obama administration, the Department of Energy made a $465 million loan to Tesla that helped him produce the Model S sedan when the automaker was much smaller and faced an uncertain future. But the department made few loans during the Trump administration. After taking office, President Biden placed a renewed emphasis on green energy and zero-emission vehicles in an effort to address climate change.
In a sentence On the Redwood loan, the Department of Energy said that “the project marks a significant step toward meeting the Biden administration’s goal of making half of all new vehicles sold by 2030 zero-emission vehicles, including electric ones.” battery, plug-in hybrid electric or fuel cell electric. vehicles.”
Anodes and cathodes, two important components of every battery, are produced primarily in Asia, but Redwood and other American companies are trying to change that. The company last month began producing copper anode sheets at its Nevada campus, and is also working to produce cathode materials there. Panasonic plans to use those materials in its batteries at two US factories. Panasonic has long supplied Tesla with batteries.
Over time, Redwood plans to increasingly recycle old batteries to extract the expensive metals used in the anodes and cathodes, helping reduce the nation’s reliance on metal mined, much of it foreign.
