Nevada based company gets $2 billion loan for EV battery production

RENO, Nev. (KOLO) - The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a conditional $2 billion loan to Nevada based company Redwood Materials.

The money will be for the construction and expansion of battery materials in McCarren to support the electric vehicle market.

On Thursday morning, Governor Joe Lombardo joined U.S. Department of Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm at the Redwood Battery Materials campus for a special event celebrating the company’s advancements in production of batteries.

During the event, Secretary Granholm announced the Biden Administration and US D.O.E.’s approval of that $2 billion conditional loan to help the Nevada-based company manufacture and recycle critical components of lithium-ion batteries. The 2 billion dollar loan is in support of clean energy manufacturing at Redwood and recycling of the of lithium-ion batteries. The batteries play a critical role in the nation’s growing clean-energy economy.

Upon becoming fully operational, the facility would become the first domestic location to support the production of anode copper foil and cathode active materials a fully closed-loop lithium-ion battery manufacturing process by recycling end-of-life battery and production scrap and remanufacturing that feedstock into critical materials.

“The president said: ‘lets put together an industrial strategy that brings back supply chains here that doesn’t seed this area in clean energy, but in batteries in particular to Asia, we’re going to do it we’re going to make this stuff here and the full supply chain;’ and that’s what Redwood Materials announcement today represents,” said Secretary Granholm.

Redwood Materials CEO JB Straubel says the company plans to produce components for these electric vehicle batteries from both new and recycled sources in the U.S. The company is expected to create around 3,400 jobs, 1,600 of them full-time.

The new commitment builds on several additional loan announcements to support domestic production of various vehicle technologies.

Redwood Materials is expected to support the production of more than one million electric vehicles at full capacity, which the Biden admin hopes will reduce gas consumption by 395 million gallons and reduce CO2 emissions by 3.5 million tons.

Redwood Materials will use both new and recycled feedstocks to produce around 36,000 tons of battery grade copper foil for battery construction a year.

Construction of anode and cathodes occurs almost exclusively in Asia. With this new investment, the Biden admin hopes to cut into that market.

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