Redwood Materials Plans to Spend a 3.5 Billion Dollars on Making EV Battery Essentials

Redwood materials were founded by the former Tesla Inc executive JB Straubel, who said on Monday that it plans to spend $3.5 billion on a battery material factory in northwest Nevada, confirming an earlier report by the Wall Street Journal.

The auto industry has been ramping up the production of Electric vehicles to meet a demand surge, driving up orders for batteries and raw materials such as cobalt, lithium, etc.

Five-year-old Redwood Materials is ramping up cathode and anode components production to 100 gigawatts per hour by 2025, enough to supply batteries for 1 million EVs in a year, then to 500 GWh by 2030 to provide 5 million EVs in a year or more.

Redwood Materials, whose partners include automakers Ford Motor Co and EV battery maker Panasonic Holding Corp, is building a closed-loop battery ecosystem to lower EV costs by cutting dependence on imported materials while reducing the environmental impact.

Redwood Materials said, The Nevada plant, under construction outside Reno, is expected to be one of the first U.S. facilities to produce critical ingredients needed to make batteries that power electric vehicles. It expects to spend $3.5 billion over ten years on the plant and offer more than 1,500 full-time jobs.

In May, Straubel said the company aimed to start production of copper foil used for electric vehicle battery anodes at its Nevada facility by the end of 2022, adding Panasonic Corp would be the first customer for the anodes.