Electric vehicle (EV) battery manufacturing capacity in North America in 2030 is projected to surge. It will be nearly 20 times greater than in 2021, according to the US government’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.
It said a wave of planned EV battery plants will increase North America’s battery manufacturing capacity from 55GWh per year in 2021 to nearly 1,000GWh per year by 2030.
Most of the announced battery plant projects are scheduled to begin production between 2025 and 2030, it said. By 2030, this production capacity will be able to support the manufacture of 10–13 million EVs per year.
The Argonne National Laboratory said the vast majority of this announced capacity is for manufacturing battery cells, though a few plants are dedicated solely to assembly of packs and modules.
To optimise supply chain logistics, many battery plants will be built alongside car plants. Most of the planned projects in the US are concentrated along a north-south band from Michigan to Alabama. Based on current plans, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Michigan will see the highest growth in battery manufacturing capacity.
Argonne said in a report last November that the number of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) sold in the US has consistently grown since 2010, reaching 4% of the light-duty vehicle market in 2021.
Over 2.1 million PEVs have been sold in the US through until December 2021, it said. It added 1.3 million of these were fully-electric battery electric vehicles (BEVs), and 800,000 were plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), which also run on petrol.
The sales-weighted average range for BEVs reached 290 miles in 2021 and 28 miles for PHEVs. Argonne estimates that electric vehicles have driven 68 billion miles on electricity since 2010, thereby reducing national petrol consumption by 0.54% in 2021 and 2.5 billion gallons cumulatively up to and including 2021.
Since 2010, 65% of PEVs sold in the US were assembled domestically, and over 110GWh of lithium-ion batteries have been installed in vehicles to date.
