Little is known about the incentive agreement the company has with the state. However, Redwood, a fabric and battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel, agreed to spend at least $3. 5 billion in the region over the decade. In particular, the company said all of its South Carolina operations will be 100% electric and will not use fossil fuels in its processes. Straubel told TechCrunch that they weren’t even installing a fuel line at the site.
The campus, located in Camp Hall in Berkeley County, will produce one hundred GWh of anode and cathode parts per year, the company said, which is enough to power more than a million electric vehicles. have elements. There are two electrodes, an anode (negative) on one side and a cathode (positive) on the other. Usually, an electrolyte is located in the medium and acts as a messenger to move ions between the electrodes that are charged and discharged. Cathode sheets, which account for more than a portion of a battery cell’s charge, involve lithium, nickel and cobalt. Redwood can capture all those fabrics through recycling and processing its batteries.
Redwood added that it was imaginable to expand its consistent flows at the site to several hundred GWh consistent with the year to meet long-term demand. And that may happen, given the expansion of the electric vehicle industry and the site’s proximity to existing Redwood partners, such as Toyota, Volvo, Panasonic and Envision AESC, all of which have a strong presence in this region.
Redwood plans to innovate in the first quarter of 2023 for its construction in stages. The company aims to have its recycling process up and running by the end of 2023 with the production of anode and cathode parts following.
The announcement highlights the explosive expansion of Redwood Materials, which last year raised $700 million in a Series C circular directed through budget and accounts through T. Rowe Price Associates and included Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Baillie Gifford, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Fidelity.
Earlier this year, Redwood won a multimillion-dollar contract to supply Panasonic Energy of North America with battery cell cathodes produced at a new plant recently under construction in Kansas. Sparks, Nevada, is expected to begin mass production of its “2170” lithium-ion cylindrical batteries through March 2025.
Today’s announcement also reflects a thriving battery ecosystem that has evolved as automakers try to lock down the supply chain as EV production ramps up.
While factories are popping up all over the world, they have been active in North America. This speed of announcements of new battery installations in North America has accelerated since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, a large bill that includes a number of weather and electrical provisions and imposes new domestic production and sourcing needs on electric cars to qualify for $7,500 federal tax credits.
“The Inflation Reduction Act has accelerated even what was already a quick procedure for many corporations to locate or expand battery production in the United States,” Straubel told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “Now you see classified ads every week and quite a few of them land in the Southeast, or in the so-called ‘battery belt’ between Michigan and Georgia. “
Redwood Materials is headquartered in Carson City, Nevada, where several years ago it began recycling waste from mobile battery production in Sparks, Nevada Gigafactory, then mined and processed fabrics such as cobalt, nickel and lithium that are mined and then supplied back to Panasonic.
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