- Ford’s contentious Michigan battery plant is finally up and running.
- Batteries there use technology licensed directly from China’s CATL.
- CATL helped build the plant and still supports its daily operation.
Construction of Ford’s controversial battery plant in Michigan has wrapped, and production is underway, which means the site is now turning out packs built on technology licensed straight from Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co, better known as CATL.
CATL vice president Meng Xiangfeng confirmed earlier this week that work at the site is done and that battery production kicked off in June. The company hasn’t just handed Ford the technology for the lithium-iron phosphate batteries made there, it has also had a hand in building the plant and keeping it running day to day.
Read: Ford’s $19.5 Billion EV Flop And Its 28% Stock Surge Run On The Same Batteries
Getting to this point has been a bumpy ride for both Ford and CATL. The joint plant, along with the battery licensing agreement, was first announced in February 2023, back when Joe Biden still held the presidency and before current President Trump gutted the Inflation Reduction Act with his One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
That deal has drawn scrutiny from the start. House Republicans initially sought to bar any battery tied to a Chinese firm from qualifying for federal tax credits, and the production credit was stripped out in early versions of the bill before the final law preserved it for batteries and grandfathered Ford’s existing CATL arrangement. As recently as January, the Republican chair of a House committee wrote to CEO Jim Farley questioning Ford’s plan to build energy-storage batteries with CATL technology.
Under the original terms, the plant would have made Ford eligible for a government subsidy of $45 per kilowatt-hour of batteries produced on site. Initially, the plant was designed to support an annual capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh), or enough to supply up to 400,000 EVs.
Battery Storage Shift
Ford eventually pared back its plans for the plant, reducing its investment to $2 billion and lowering expected output to 20 GWh.
Perhaps more importantly, Ford has moved away from its original plan to use its CATL-licensed LFP batteries only for EVs, and now intends to put them into battery storage as well. That pivot is already underway at the Ford and CATL factory in Kentucky. Ford ultimately plans to deploy at least 20 GWh of these batteries annually for use in energy-storage systems.
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