According to US media Automotive News, Panasonic Energy CEO Shinichi Shinichi delivered a speech at the company’s annual business strategy meeting yesterday and confirmed that Panasonic will build a third electric vehicle battery factory in the United States.
Panasonic currently operates a battery manufacturing Gigafactory in Nevada with Tesla and is building a second Gigafactory in DeSoto, Kansas. Previously, Panasonic had said that it would spend 700 billion yen on equipment investment this year, and more than half of the funds will be used for the expansion of the Desoto factory, which is expected to open in 2024. put into production.
▲ Source: Panasonic
According to previous reports, last year there was news that Panasonic would build a third battery factory in the United States, and said that the site would be in Kansas or Oklahoma. Only the letter yesterday did not announce the specific location yesterday, but said that it will be announced before March 2024, and is currently considering several alternative locations. However, given that a second battery factory is already in Kansas, there are rumors that a third will break ground in Oklahoma.
Panasonic is planning to massively increase battery production for electric vehicles in the near future and triple battery production by 2030 while increasing the energy density of batteries by 25%.
Regarding the production capacity of the third battery factory, Zhiyiyi said that its production capacity will be 30GWh per year, which is lower than the current 40GWh production capacity of the Nevada Gigafactory, but will be higher than LG New Energy’s Arizona plant, and it will be tied with Panasonic’s Kansas plant under construction. No. 2 in North America.
Tesla currently uses Panasonic 2170 cells in its electric vehicles, and Lucid announced late last year that it would use Panasonic cells in its Air sedan and upcoming Gravity SUV.
