The first half of the article is blather. Scroll down to the map and below.
The data tracking of batteries is poor to non existent. I believe that some point there will be a futures market for megawatts of batteries and then we will have awesome data on capacity, future capacity and charts and graphs on materials input costs.
Until then this article is about the best summary we can get on what is happening.
Just glancing through the article it looks like 60 billion over the next 5 years in North American production. While it seems like a lot of new jobs, I noticed that a lot of the plants are going into existing or shuttered plants. So a lot of the jobs will be replacement jobs not new jobs.
On the other hand, a lot of jobs will be had in construction for several years. I suspect that housing in the industrial sections of the country will remain firm for the rest of the decade. This is even in the face of high interest rates.
This will be exponentially larger if more utilities like Green Mountain Power get on board. (I expect this will come slowly, if at all, because it means embracing distributed power rather than centralized control, something managements seem to have a problem with for unexplainable reasons. Ho ho.)
The utility says it will be cheaper than building a lot of new transmission lines and power plants, even saying it will end power outages for its customers.
Since 2015, Green Mountain’s has run a program that allows customers to integrate their existing home battery energy storage systems into the grid, as well as lease Tesla home batteries. Caps on the popular program were recently lifted.
They tell us EVs will require many fewer parts than internal combustion vehicles. Some of those lost jobs will become battery plants, electrode plants, and lithium processing plants.
It would be interesting to see some numbers. Batteries production will employ some but i think we still expect a net loss. Battery plants will probably be near EV assembly plants. Probably not so for lithium processing. Some geographical dislocation is expected.
For those who may have missed it, the Ford plant in Marshall, MI is in trouble. Ford suspended work on it a few weeks ago, mumbling something about whether the plant was viable or not. Their partner in the Kentucky and Tennessee plants is a South Korean company, but their partner in the Marshall plant is a ChiCom company, which is drawing a lot of pushback from certain factions in Congress.
May come faster than expected. Virtual power plants (VPPs) are aggregations of privately owned batteries that sell dispatchable power to the grid when needed. California (as usual) has the most VPPs with 4,000 MW total and rising quickly. Texas has initiated a program that is expanding even faster.
Tesla (as usual) seems to be taking a lead role in the program, which has gone international.