Binyamin Appelbaum: 'The urgency of global warming means that the Biden administration may be gambling with time it can’t afford to lose.'
Over the next few years, however, hundreds of Moses Lake residents are going to be entering the electric vehicle business. Two companies, attracted by cheap hydropower, are opening plants there, each backed by $100 million in federal money, to produce a key ingredient for electric vehicle batteries.
Novelist Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”In Moses Lake, where one city official described the local version of the American dream to me as “house-boat-truck,” it is possible to imagine that one day in the not-too-distant future, workers at the battery plants will be driving electric pickups.
Both companies say they would have moved ahead even without direct federal funding. But the money does mean that they can grow faster. Rick Luebbe, CEO of Group14, said the company was able to raise additional capital on the back of the federal money, allowing it to build two production lines in Moses Lake rather than one.
Chinese companies also have raced ahead in the market for electric vehicle batteries, but the Biden administration is hoping to leapfrog them by investing in a new generation of ideas. China controls three-quarters of the world’s supply of graphite, but “our technology requires sand and energy,” said Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila. “Those can be sourced in quite a lot of places.”
Brant Mayo, executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Council, said the Moses Lake region has been chasing factories since the early 1990s to bring higher-paying jobs to the area. Government investment can allow companies to take risks that investors wouldn’t support, but it also can insulate companies from market discipline, propping up underperforming technologies and preventing better ideas from gaining traction. Preserving factory jobs also is expensive, and higher costs could slow the adoption of electric vehicles. It costs about twice as much to build a battery plant in the United States as in China, according to one recent estimate.
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