Green energy takes hold in unlikely places with Ford project
Carmaker to add 10,800 jobs making electric vehicles, batteries
When Ford revealed plans to ramp up its commitment to the fledgling electric vehicle sector, the automaker chose to create thousands of jobs and pump billions in investments into two states where Republican leaders have vilified the push for green energy and defended fossil fuels.
Teaming with its battery partner, SK Innovation of South Korea, Ford said Monday it will spend $5.6 billion in Stanton, Tennessee, where it will build a factory to produce electric F-Series pickups. A joint venture called BlueOvalSK will construct a battery factory on the same site near Memphis, plus twin battery plants in Glendale, Kentucky. Ford estimated the Kentucky investment at $5.8 billion. The single largest manufacturing venture in the iconic company’s history will create an estimated 10,800 jobs.
Choosing Tennessee and Kentucky for the coveted mega-projects created an ironic disconnect between the automaker’s high-stakes bet on the future of battery-powered vehicles and the rhetoric from many Republican leaders who have railed against a shift toward green energy and away from fossil fuels.
On Monday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell applauded Ford for giving an economic boost to Kentucky, saying it solidified his home state’s position “as a world-class automotive state on the cutting edge of research and development.” McConnell sounded a different theme two months earlier, when he took to the Senate floor to blast Democrats for wanting to “wage war on fossil fuels” and tried to turn their efforts to promote electric vehicles into a wedge issue.
“They want to further expand giant tax credit giveaways for costly electric cars — when 80% of it is going to households earning six figures and up,” McConnell said in July. “They
also want money and mandates to push the entire federal government fleet toward electric cars, too. Wouldn’t you just love to see an IRS auditor pull up to your tax audit in a $97,000 Tesla?”
In Kentucky, where Republican state lawmakers recently joined Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in approving an incentives package credited with helping lure the battery project to Glendale, hostility toward green energy has focused on the decline of coal production and the erosion of good-paying mining jobs in regions that depended on them. The battery plants will be built in central Kentucky, a lengthy drive from the coalfields of eastern and western Kentucky. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who tweeted out his thanks to Ford for its latest investment in the state, routinely lambastes the Green New Deal. In 2019, he condemned it as an “industry-killing, allout assault on our way of life in Kentucky” and an attack on automobile makers.
Tennessee GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn said the project “will transform the landscape of West Tennessee.” Last month, in explaining her vote against a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, she said much of the legislation amounted to a “gateway to socialism — a lot of Green New Deal in there.” She said that Tennesseans “don’t want the Green New Deal.”
Scott Jennings, a Kentuckian and former adviser to Republican President George W. Bush, said Tuesday that politicians generally support economic development “however they can get it.”
“And as for Republicans, at least most of us, we support markets,” he said. “And if the market bears the production of electric vehicles then I don’t think anyone will see this as an affront to their culture or energy heritage. There’s still a role for coal and other fossil fuels in this world ... and this plant won’t change that. I’ve always viewed conservatives as being for ‘all of the above’ energy strategies and this certainly fits that slogan.”