EV battery plant

Panasonic’s new US$4 billion battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, is designed to be a model of sustainability – it’s an all-electric factory with no need for a smokestack. When finished, it will cover the size of 48 football fields, employ 4,000 people and produce enough advanced batteries to supply half a million electric cars per year. But there’s a catch, and it’s a big one. While the factory will run on wind and solar power much of the time, renewables supplied only 34% of the local utility Evergy’s electricity in 2023. In much of the U.S., fossil fuels still play a key role in meeting power demand. In fact, Evergy has asked permission to extend the life of an old coal-fired power plant to meet growing demand, including from the battery factory. With my students at Wellesley College, I’ve been tracking the boom in investments in clean energy manufacturing and how those projects – including battery, solar panel and wind turbine...

One big question keeps surfacing after the Biden administration announced plans to raise auto standards so sharply they would likely boost electric vehicle production to 67% of all new passenger vehicle sales in under a decade: Can automakers pull that off? The proposal would require a huge change in production and consumer choice. To put it in perspective, in 2022 about 6% of U.S. passenger vehicle sales were all-electric. I study the electric vehicle industry and policy. Here’s why I think the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan can succeed. Automakers have met tough targets before Automakers typically push back against tougher rules and often lobby to get standards relaxed. However, U.S. car companies have also shown that they can meet ambitious goals. When California began requiring that car companies sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles, its initial target translated to about 15% of all new car sales by 2025. Automakers quickly exceeded tha...