Kansas Electric Vehicle Battery Plant Will Need To Rely On Coal-Fired Power Facility

You couldn’t make this stuff up even if you tried.

A new electric vehicle battery factory in Kansas is demanding so much energy that the state is delaying the retirement of a coal plant to make sure the facility has enough power.https://t.co/gU3LACRuT0

— Cowboy State Daily (@daily_cowboy) September 22, 2023

Panasonic broke ground on the facility last year. The Japanese company was slated to receive $6.8 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been pouring billions into electric vehicles and battery factories as part of its effort to transition America away from fossil fuels. 

The Kansas City Star reports that the factory will require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity to operate. That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city. 

In testimony to the Kansas City Corporation Commission, which is the state’s equivalent of the Wyoming Public Service Commission, a representative of Evergy, the utility serving the factory, said that the 4 million-square-foot Panasonic facility creates “near term challenges from a resource adequacy perspective,” according to the newspaper. 

As a result, the utility will continue to burn coal at a power plant near Lawrence, Kansas, and it will delay plants to transition units at the plant to natural gas. 

Not surprisingly, environmentalists are not happy. But what has happened reveals something not widely known when it comes to electric vehicle production: they need huge amounts of energy to be made.

As the Cowboy State Daily points out:

A 15-pound lithium-ion battery holds about the same amount of energy as a pound of oil. To make that battery requires 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals that go into that battery. The average EV battery weighs around 1,000 pounds. 

All of that mining and factory processing produces a lot more carbon dioxide emissions than a gas-powered car, so EVs have to be driven around 50,000 to 60,000 miles before there’s a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. 

With the large amount of demand that could come from making electric vehicles overall, there will be more demands on the energy grid. Consequently, that means fossil fuel sources, like coal, will needed to power energy plants in order to satisfy electric vehicle factory demands. Electric vehicles are far worse polluters than gas-powered ones.