- $7.5B loan would help scale up battery production in Indiana
- Aiming for 67 gigawatt-hours of annual capacity there
- DOE loan comes from same program that supported Tesla
The Department of Energy on Monday said it is prepared to loan up to $7.5 billion to Stellantis and Samsung SDI for battery production in Indiana.
The conditional loan commitment might aim to be finalized by the Department of Energy (DOE) before the Biden administration leaves office, as incoming President Donald Trump has opposed Biden’s efforts to boost EV manufacturing, Reuters noted.
If approved, the loan will fund two battery plants in Kokomo, Indiana, being built under the StarPlus Energy joint venture between Stellantis and Samsung SDI. The first plant is due to open in 2025, with the second one scheduled to open in 2027. The two Indiana plants continue a relationship that goes back to the original low-volume Fiat 500e, which also used Samsung SDI battery cells.
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Stellantis and Samsung SDI are aiming for 67 gigawatt-hours of annual production capacity in Indiana, according to the DOE. Stellantis is also continuing work on a single plant in Canada, in partnership with LG Energy Solution. The automaker said in 2022 that it would aim for more than 45 gigawatt-hours of capacity. Samsung, meanwhile, is also partnering with General Motors on an Indiana battery plant.
The DOE in July said it also planned to loan Stellantis $334.8 million to convert its Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois for EV production, and $250 million for production of EV drive modules at existing facilities in Kokomo, Reuters noted, adding that this has not been finalized.
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Last week, the agency also confirmed a conditional commitment for a loan of up to $6.6 billion to Rivian, which would help fund the automaker’s second assembly plant in Georgia, as well as continued development work on its mid-size platform for EVs.
The ATVM loan program that oversees this loan and others was established under the George W. Bush administration to help companies make vehicles with substantially higher energy efficiency than those they replace. Tesla arguably might not have become a viable company without a 2009 loan from the DOE under this program, that it paid off in 2013.
No ATVM awards were made during the last Trump administration, but the DOE did refine the application process during that term, in 2019, and the Biden-era Infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act expanded its reach to more technologies and sectors, including “medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles, trains, locomotives, maritime vessels, aircraft, and hyperloop technology.”