- A $7.5B loan will help boost battery production in Indiana
- It aims for 67 gigawatt hours of annual capacity there
- The DOE loan comes from the same program that backed Tesla
The Department of Energy on Monday said it is ready to lend up to $7.5 billion to Stellantis and Indiana-based battery maker Samsung SDI.
The conditional loan commitment may be aimed at being finalized by the Department of Energy (DOE) before the Biden administration leaves office, as incoming President Donald Trump opposes Biden's efforts to boost EV production, Reuters noted.
If approved, the loan will be funded two battery plants in Kokomo, Indianawhich was built under the StarPlus Energy partnership between Stellantis and Samsung SDI. The first plant should open in 2025, and the second is 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 aim for it 67 gigawatt hours of annual production capacity in Indiana, according to the DOE. Stellantis also continues work on one plant in Canada, in partnership with LG Energy Solution. The automaker said by 2022 it will aim to operate at more than 45 gigawatt hours. Samsung, on the other hand, is working with General Motors on the Indiana battery plant.
The DOE in July said it also plans to loan Stellantis $334.8 million to convert its Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois to EV production, and $250 million to produce EV drive modules at existing facilities in -Kokomo, Reuters noted, adding that this has not yet been finalized. .
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Last week, the agency also confirmed a conditional loan commitment of up to $6.6 billion to Rivian, which will help fund the automaker's second assembly plant in Georgia, as well as ongoing development work at its mid-sized EV facility.
The ATVM loan program that oversees this debt and others was created under the George W. Bush administration to help companies that make vehicles that use more energy than the ones they replace. Tesla arguably wouldn't have been a viable company without a 2009 loan from the DOE, under the program, which it repaid in 2013.
No ATVM awards were made during the last Trump administration, but the DOE refined the application process during that time, in 2019, along with the Biden Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. expand its reach into more technologies and sectorsincluding “medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, trains, trains, naval vessels, aircraft, and hyperloop technology.”