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A California energy technology startup has officially named the location of its debut battery factory.
Sparkz, a developer of lithium-ion batteries produced without cobalt, first announced plans to establish a production facility in West Virginia earlier this year. The Associated Press reports that the final location will be a 482,000-square-foot building near Bridgeport, West Virginia. The site formerly housed an AGC Flat Glass production facility that shut down in 2009.
Sparkz founder and CEO Sanjiv Malhotra, the former investment director at the U.S. Department of Energy, said the factory is an optimal location to “being re-engineering the battery supply to end China’s dominance in energy storage.”
Sparkz was founded in 2019 and secured six patents from the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to make cobalt-free batteries, which would eliminate the need for battery markers to procure the metal from mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — primarily controlled by Chinese companies.
The West Virginia factory is expected to create 350 jobs, and Sparkz has reached an agreement with the United Mine Workers of America union to retrain former workers in the state’s embattled coal sector to staff the facility. Malhotra said the hiring of coalfield families would begin “today.”
The facility’s first batteries will likely be used in agricultural equipment, material handling vehicles, and energy storage systems. Once certified, it will be able to produce batteries for electric vehicles.
Image Credit: Roman Zaiets / Shutterstock.com
