Hyundai and LG Announce $4.3 Billion Plant in Georgia To Build Batteries for Electric Vehicles (apnews.com) 19
Hyundai Motor and LG Energy have announced they will build a $4.3 billion electric battery plant as part of Hyundai's new electric vehicle assembly plant in southeast Georgia. From a report: The companies will split the investment, starting production as soon as late 2025. Hyundai Motor CEO Jaehoon Chang said in a statement that the battery plant would "create a strong foundation to lead the global EV transition," explaining the company wants to speed up efforts to produce electrified Hyundai and Kia vehicles in North America. "Hyundai Motor Group is focusing on its electrification efforts to secure a leadership position in the global auto industry," Chang said. The South Korean automaker said in 2022 it would invest $5.5 billion to assemble electric vehicles and batteries in Ellabell, just west of Savannah. The site is supposed to have 8,100 employees and is slated to begin producing vehicles in 2025.
The IRA is working as intended. (Score:1)
Forget Trump or Biden. Joe Manchin is most savvy political genius in America today.
This absolutely wouldn't have happened without his work on the IRA.
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An interested revision of history. I'm not sure what mark Manchin had on the IRA, other than drawing out the process, sabotaging it more than once, paring back its scope and impact, all while basking in the attention it got him, and making sure his fossil fuel interests got some loving.
I'm not sure that qualifies as political savvy, more like narciss
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He insisted on the "Made in America" clauses which directly lead to this specific outcome.
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Why would free market places be more likely to get jobs ?
But why WOULDN'T companies prefer to go to has been places like Connecticut or Delaworst and have every detail spelled out for them by incompetent government overlords ?
And why WOULDN'T they want their profits snatched out of their pockets ?
I'll never understand business !
More to the point, why open a factory in Connecticut or Delaware, with the 6th and 16th highest median incomes in the US [wikipedia.org] when you could open it in a state with the 29th highest median income.
I've leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why wages are so much higher in blue states than "pro-business" red states*.
* No, it's not that blue state policies are better for business (though that may be true). But opening a factory is going to depend more on the intersection of the size of the qualified ta
Swayed by a song (Score:2)
During one of the meetings between Hyundai and LG, some oldies station happened to play "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia". They probably thought the state needed the batteries.
Where is the raw material coming from? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's great to open new battery factories but I'd like to know where the raw materials are coming from. If the factory is domestic but the raw materials are imported then that still leaves us dependent on foreign nations for vital commodities.
There was quite the deal made about finding out that magnets used in F-35 fighter jets were coming from China. Anything coming from a foreign nation to produce anything for the military is a problem, that leaves the military with the potential of being in short supply of material should a war disrupt shipping. This is an even bigger issue if the materials being imported is coming from a known adversary. While it would be difficult for China to do something nefarious with something as trivial as a magnet this oversight shows flaws in the supply chain.
If the USA is going to be reliant on BEVs in the future then we need to have sufficient domestic capacity to meet demand in case of another war. China isn't going to leave itself reliant on the USA, because they know that can be used against them. Russia used their supply of natural gas to Europe as leverage to keep them from running to Ukraine's aid. That had some limited success. That's leaving Europe in a panic trying to build more nuclear power plants, mine more coal, and import natural gas by ships from nations in the Americas. Putting natural gas on a ship in Canada, USA, Brazil, or wherever, and floating that over to Europe is very expensive. Finding alternative sources for any commodity on short notice is expensive, lithium, cobalt, phosphates, nickel, or whatever it is that goes in these batteries is no different.
I'm not terribly interested in hearing about new battery factories opening since it looks to me like the raw material supply is the bottleneck here. Open more mines. Open these mines in the USA. If these mines are not in the USA then we are just giving more control over our economy to our adversaries.
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You know that Hyundai and LG are South Korean companies, right?
Open more mines. Open these mines in the USA. If these mines are not in the USA then we are just giving more control over our economy to our adversaries.
What is your problem here? You seem desperate to not build batteries in the US. I suppose you would be happier if they were built by "our adversaries", in their own country, whoever that is. The first item on your list is lithium, which is mostly mined in South America and Australia. I'm not seeing where these mysterious "adversaries" are located.
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Seaports on the Gulf and Atlantic seaboards are expanding, as is the inland transportation infrastructure, so factories east of the Mississippi have better access to raw materials and export transpo for finished goods than they've ever had. I also expect more raw battery materials to come from Africa so factories near Atlantic ports are a plus.
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