From Reuters via Yahoo Finance, June
The U.S. Energy Department plans to lend up to $9.2 billion to a joint venture of Ford Motor and South Korea's SK On to help it build three battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky, the biggest-ever award from the government program.
The conditional commitment for the low-cost government loan for the BlueOval SK joint venture comes from the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program.
SK is a unit of South Korea's SK Innovation. The joint venture is building two battery manufacturing plants in Kentucky and one in Tennessee capable of collectively producing more than 120 gigawatt hours annually, the Energy Department said.
Jigar Shah, head of the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, said in an interview its goal "is to have people choose to put these supply chains here in the United States, not in other countries, and to do them faster and more confidently here."
Ford and SK announced in 2021 they would invest $11.4 billion to build a F-150 electric vehicle (EV) assembly plant and three battery plants in the United States with Ford investing $7 billion. Ford shares were up 1.2% in afternoon trading.
This is the sixth loan for battery supply chain projects from the ATVM program.
PUBLIC-PRIVATE COLLABORATION
The project is expected to create 5,000 construction jobs in Tennessee and Kentucky, and 7,500 operations jobs once the plants are up and running.
"Major technology transitions have always been accelerated by collaboration between the public and private sectors," said Ford Treasurer Dave Webb....
....MUCH MORE
I'm trying to recall the details of Henry Ford's public-private collaboration but am drawing a blank. If there was some way we could harness the P.R. spin of the recipients of the $770 Billion of government largess, we would have an inexhaustible energy source.
