A $4 billion Panasonic electric vehicle battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, will help satisfy the Biden administration’s efforts to get everyone into an EV.
The cost is $4 billion but will get $6.8 billion in taxpayer subsidies from the Biden "inflation reduction act"
It also will help extend the life of a coal-fired power plant.
Panasonic broke ground on the facility last year. The Japanese company was slated to receive $6.8 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been pouring billions into electric vehicles and battery factories as part of its effort to transition America away from fossil fuels.
As a result, the utility will continue to burn coal at a power plant near Lawrence, Kansas, and it will delay plants to transition units at the plant to natural gas.
A 15-pound lithium-ion battery holds about the same amount of energy as a pound of oil. To make that battery requires 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals that go into that battery. The average EV battery weighs around 1,000 pounds.
All of that mining and factory processing produces a lot more carbon dioxide emissions than a gas-powered car, so EVs have to be driven around 50,000 to 60,000 miles before there’s a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
So, as more factories are built in the U.S. to supply EV manufacturers, there will be higher demands on the grid for power.
And environmentalists are not happy about that.
The situation reflects an ignored fact about EVs — they require enormous amounts of energy to produce.
Thanks to our friend Anton Wahlman for the tipoff...