The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act is already impacting battery investments.
Novonix, a battery-technology firm spun out of Dalhousie University, recently won a US$150-million grant from the U.S. energy department to build out its Tennessee battery business.
Novonix’s grant fell under an infrastructure bill. But according to the company’s CEO, Chris Burns, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which ties EV purchase incentives to North American manufacturing and critical minerals sourced from U.S. trade partners, is encouraging domestic investment.
In Canada, “I think you’ll see reciprocity in the idea of ‘things from the U.S. can come up to Canada and still be qualified,’” for government incentives, Burns said in an interview with The Logic.
As the Canadian government prepares to unveil its fall economic statement this afternoon, it is under pressure to match some of the U.S. policies favouring North American manufacturing to keep Canada competitive with its neighbours for EV-related plants.
“The real question is … of things that can be IRA-eligible and could land in the U.S. or Canada, what structures and what incentives will [the Canadian government] put in place to try to land them in Canada?”
Novonix’s top brass includes Burns, a former senior research engineer at Tesla, and chief scientific advisor Jeff Dahn, who began a research partnership with Tesla in 2016. Former General Motors CEO Daniel Akerson joined the board last week.
The company does battery testing and R&D for customers, has memorandums of understanding and conditional agreements to make battery anodes for Samsung and Sanyo, and has a growing cathode-material business.
While the cathode supply chain has been expanding, anodes have been a bit of a hole in the North American market, one that is today primarily filled with Chinese graphite suppliers.
“We’re starting to see a bit more of a rush to catch the anode side of the market up,” Burns said. “A good example: three graphite projects were selected under the infrastructure law program.”
Burns said his company’s technology cuts down the CO2 emissions for synthetic graphite production by 60 per cent compared with Chinese alternatives, and that the firm considers energy-grid composition a “critical” part of its site selection along the Tennessee river.
“There are great, abundant supplies of hydropower, especially in Ontario and Quebec,” he said. “The battery supply chain is a power-heavy business. … That is still always going to be a strain on the power grids, even from renewables. And so we need to continue to focus on not just promoting jurisdictions with clean power, but promoting technologies that are less power-intensive.”
Novonix plans to hire over 1,000 people for the grant-funded project, and has been working on a program for local high schools and universities to help fill the talent gap as the battery supply chain expands in North America. He said Novonix has similar plans in Canada, where it is opening a new cathode-materials plant next week.
“In Canada, meanwhile, the team is continuing to grow steadily across all the elements that it’s focusing on—service to the industry and hardware equipment, as well as our R&D teams,” he said. “Walking a similar path that not that we did with our anode technology a few years ago.”
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