Panasonic's latest $4 billion battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, is meant to be a model for sustainability – it’s all-electric factory without the necessity for a chimney. Once accomplished, it should be the scale of 48 football fields, employ 4,000 people and produce enough advanced batteries to power half 1,000,000 electric cars per yr.
But there's a catch, and an enormous one.
While the factory runs on wind and solar energy more often than not, Renewable energy supplies only 34% of electricity from local energy supplier Evergy in 2023.
In much of the United States, fossil fuels still play a key role in meeting electricity needs. In fact, Evergy asked for permission Extend the lifetime of an old coal-fired power plant to satisfy the growing demand, including from the battery factory.
I used to be there with my students at Wellesley College Tracking the boom in investment in clean energy manufacturing and the way these projects – including battery, solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing and their supply chains – Map of the country's power grid.
The Kansas battery plant highlights the challenges ahead because the U.S. increases production of fresh energy technologies and shifts away from fossil fuels. It also highlights the industry's potential to speed up the transition to renewable energy across the country.
The clean tech manufacturing boom
Let's start with some excellent news.
In the battery sector alone, firms have announced plans to construct 44 large factories which have the potential to supply enough battery cells to provide greater than 10 million electric vehicles per yr in 2030.
That's the extent of commitment needed if the U.S. is to combat climate change and meet its latest auto emissions standards announced in March 2024.
The challenge: These battery factories and the electrical vehicles equipped with them would require plenty of electricity.
Produce enough battery cells To store 1 kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity – enough for a spread of two to 4 miles in an electrical vehicle – requires about 30 kWh of producing energy, in accordance with a Recent study.
Combine this estimate and our trackingWe estimate that battery manufacturing within the U.S. would require about 30 billion kWh of electricity per yr in 2030, assuming that factories just like the one in Kansas are powered by electricity. This represents about 2% of total US industrial electricity consumption in 2022.
The enormous solar potential of the battery belt
Numerous these facilities are planned in a region of the southern United States generally known as “Battery belt.” The potential of solar energy is high in much of the region, but the ability grid takes care of it little profit from it.
Found our tracking that three quarters of the battery production capability is positioned in states with Below-average renewable electricity generation Today. And in just about all of those places, higher demand will result in a rise Border emissionsbecause this extra energy almost all the time comes from fossil fuels.
However, we've also been monitoring which battery firms are committing to powering their manufacturing operations with renewable electricity, and the information points to a cleaner future.
We estimate that half of batteries will probably be manufactured in factories which have committed to using not less than 50% of their electricity needs from renewable energy by 2030. Even higher, these commitments are focused on regions of the U.S. where investment has lagged.
Some firms are already taking motion. Tesla is constructing this world's largest solar system on the roof of his factory in Texas. LG is committed to procurement 100% renewable solar and hydropower for its latest cathode factory in Tennessee. And Panasonic is taking steps to attain this Net zero emissions for all of its factories, including the brand new ones in Kansas, by 2030.
More corporate commitments may also help strengthen demand for wind and solar energy deployment across the emerging battery belt.
What this implies for electricity demand within the USA
Making all those batteries and charging all those electric vehicles will put rather a lot more strain on the grid. But that shouldn’t be an argument against electric vehicles. Everything connected to the grid, be it an electrical vehicle or the factory that makes its batteries, will grow to be cleaner as more renewable energy sources come online.
This transition is already going down. Although natural gas will dominate electricity generation in 2023 Renewable energy supplies more electricity than coal For the primary time in US history. The Government forecasts that in 2024, 96% of latest generation capability added to the grid could be fossil fuel-free, including batteries. These trends are accelerating because of the Incentives for the use of fresh energy included within the Inflation Reduction Act 2022.
looking ahead
The big lesson here is that the challenge in Kansas shouldn’t be the battery factory, however the increasingly aging power grid.
As investment in a clean energy future increases, America might want to do that redesign much of its power grid to make use of increasingly renewable energy while electrifying every part from cars to factories to homes.
This signifies that investing in modernizing, expanding and decarbonizing the electricity grid is just as necessary as constructing latest factories or switching to electric cars.
Investments in clean energy manufacturing will play a key role in enabling this transition: a few of the latest advanced batteries will probably be deployed and powered by the grid Backup energy storage for times when the production of renewable energy is decreasing or the demand for electricity is especially high.
In January, Hawaii replaced his last coal-fired power plant with a complicated battery system. It won't be long before this happens in Tennessee, Texas and Kansas.
image credit : theconversation.com