Department of Energy Stimulus Funds to Advance Electric Car Battery Technologies

Written by John Winger

Wednesday, 16 September 2009 12:41

The 2008 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act package passed by Congress included $2.4 billion of investement towards domestic battery manufacturing and related products which target the transport and automotive sectors. On August 5, 2009, the DOE announced the awarding of stimulus funds (largely in the form of grants) to 48 advanced battery and elective drive projects.

Some of the largest grants went to companies looking to build new facilities or to expand existing lithium ion battery production plants in the US. In most cases, these are next generation lithium ion technologies with improved performance attributes (i.e. price, energy density. power density, stability etc).

The following table shows a selection of grant recipients and their expected future production of batteries in facilities that will focus on automobile applications. The production levels are based on the following key metric: annual watt hours of production. A variety of assumptions and guestimates were made to complete this analysis. These production levels represent approximations.

By far the largest lithium ion factories are located in Japan, South Korea, and China and far exceed the existing capacity found in the North America and European facilities in the below table. These Asian countries have facilities that produce batteries for a variety of applications beyond the transportation sector. Large Asian manufacturers such as Samsung and Panasonic are likely planning much larger facilities with more production capacities than the ones shown in the following exhibit.

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