FREYR picks Georgia for multi-phase ‘Giga America’ battery manufacturing plant

FREYR Battery has confirmed that its 'Giga America' clean battery manufacturing facility in the U.S is to come up in Coweta County in the state of Georgia. The company is to undertake detailed plant engineering in the coming months, during which plans for the initial gigafactory module will be finalized.

The project is expected to be developed in multiple phases beginning with an initial battery cell production module of approximately 34 GWh at a preliminarily estimated capital investment of $1.7 billion.

Together with value addition for upstream and downstream modules and a second cell production phase, the total capital investments for the gigafactory is likely to exceed $2.6 billion by 2029, according to FREYR.

"Today's landmark announcement underscores FREYR's ambition to develop a very strong and near-term operational footprint in the United States. Expanding into the U.S. has been a foundational aspect of FREYR's long-term strategy from our inception, and with the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, we expect U.S. demand for ESS, passenger EV and other electric mobility applications to grow rapidly over the next decade," commented FREYR's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Tom Einar Jensen.

The Giga America project will be based on the 'SemiSolid' technology of FREYR's U.S.-based licensing partner, 24M. The Splatform enables capital and energy efficient production of lithium-ion batteries at scale, by simplifying the production process of lithium-ion batteries.

FREYR claims that the project targets to meet the rapidly growing customer demand for energy storage (ESS) applications with U.S.-based conditional offtake partners. The company is seeing very strong interest for increased volume commitments through ongoing customer dialogues.

It is to be noted that the company has already commenced building its first planned battery factory in Mo i Rana, Norway, and has recently announced potential development of industrial scale battery cell production in Vaasa, Finland.

FREYR intends to install 50 GWh of battery cell capacity by 2025, and 100 GWh annual capacity by 2028. By 2030, the company targets a cumulative capacity of 200 GWh per year.