Glendale, U.S.
Teaming with its battery partner, SK Innovation of South Korea, Ford said that it will spend $5.6 billion in Stanton, Tennessee, where it will build a factory to produce electric F-Series pickups.
A joint venture called BlueOvalSK will construct a battery factory on the same site near Memphis, plus twin battery plants in Glendale, Kentucky. Ford estimated the Kentucky investment at $5.8 billion. The single largest manufacturing venture in the iconic company’s history will create an estimated 10,800 jobs.
Choosing Tennessee and Kentucky for the coveted mega-projects created an ironic disconnect between the automaker's high-stakes bet on the future of battery-powered vehicles and the rhetoric from many Republican leaders who have railed against a shift toward green energy and away from fossil fuels.
In Kentucky, where Republican state lawmakers recently joined Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in approving an incentives package credited with helping lure the battery project to Glendale, hostility toward green energy has focused on the decline of coal production and the erosion of good-paying mining jobs in regions that depended on them. The battery plants will be built in central Kentucky, a lengthy drive from the coalfields of eastern and western Kentucky.
Beshear, who led the push that landed the state's single largest economic development project ever with the Glendale battery production project, said the private sector is leading the conversion toward green jobs.
Ford picked the Kentucky and Tennessee sites in part because of lower electricity costs, CEO Jim Farley said, as well as being less exposed to flooding and hurricanes than other states.
In Glendale, a tiny community ringed by corn and soybean fields about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Louisville, residents seemed ready to embrace the newfound ties to the green energy movement and the fight against climate change.
Source: CLICK ON DETROIT
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