Stellantis and LG plan Canadian gigafactory
STELLANTIS AND LG Energy Solution have announced a C$5 billion (£3.01bn) investment in a joint venture to build a battery factory in Canada with an annual capacity of 45GWH.
The companies claim the new site in Windsor, Ontario (handily just across the US border from Detroit), will be the first large-scale battery production plant in Canada.
It is intended to produce cells for the North American market, where the Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram brands are crucial to Stellantis’s success.
Last year, Jeep’s share of the US market, which totalled just over 15 million, was 5.16%.
Stellantis claimed that the gigafactory will open in 2024 as it pushes for five million annual global EV sales by 2030.
The ambition is for 50% of Stellantis’s North American sales and 100% of its European sales to be electric by that date.
The move comes as more manufacturers push for EV parts production in Canada.
Britishvolt hopes to open a 60GWH battery factory in Quebec in 2026, while Snow Lake Lithium’s 55,000-acre mine in Manitoba is expected to produce 160,000 tonnes of 6% lithium spodumene per year when it opens in 2024.
LG Energy Solution has been making lithium batteries since 1999. It was part of LG Chem, a subsidiary of the vast Korean conglomerate LG, before being spun off and publicly listed in December 2020.
As of 2021, it had annual sales of $15.6bn (£11.8bn) across a range of battery technologies and nearly 28,000 employees around the world.
When the Windsor factory is opened, LG Chem’s North American battery production capacity will rise to 200GWH – enough for 2.5 million EVS.