LG plans expansion for electric car batteries
LANSING, Mich. – Electric vehicle battery-maker LG Energy Solution plans a $1.7 billion expansion in western Michigan that will add up to 1,200 jobs by 2025, officials announced Tuesday.
The project at the company’s site in Holland, located about 155 miles northwest of Detroit, was approved for $56.5 million in state grants and a 20-year tax break worth $132.6 million.
Michigan Economic Development Corp. CEO Quentin Messer Jr., who chairs the Michigan Strategic Fund, said the expansion will quintuple the plant’s ability to produce battery components.
The average wage will be $1,257 a week, or about $65,000 annually, plus benefits.
“We look forward to the incredible impact this project will have on the region’s economy, small businesses and workforce for generations to come,” Messer said.
A state memo requesting the incentives says LG Energy Solution was considering facilities in the southeastern U.S. and potentially in Poland and China.
The company, which is headquartered in South Korea, could begin hiring later this year.
It manufactures large lithium-ion polymer battery cells and packs for electric vehicles and other applications.
It has joint-venture partnerships with General Motors, with which it is building three U.S. battery plants in Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler.
Court halts Amazon building in South Africa
JOHANNESBURG – A South African court has suspended construction work on a huge new business park that will house Amazon’s Africa headquarters in Cape Town after a challenge by Indigenous groups who say the development will spoil an area that’s sacred to them.
The First Nations Indigenous groups – whose ancestors are recognized as the first inhabitants of South Africa – have been working for years to permanently stop the $300 million River Club project.
The development near the city’s famed Table Mountain is set to put offices, shopping malls and housing on more than 37 acres of land that currently includes a wetlands area and a point where two rivers meet.
Amazon is to be the main tenant, according to the developers and city officials.
But the First Nations groups say the area is the site of some of their people’s earliest resistance against European colonizers in the 16th century and also has spiritual significance for them because of the meeting of the Liesbeek and Black rivers.
Last week’s judgment by the Western Cape High Court put a halt on building work until there is proper consultation with the concerned Indigenous groups.
The groups said Tuesday they will now push for the whole project to be scrapped.
“We are going to be launching a review of the entire development, including how the project was allowed to proceed against the City of Cape Town’s own environmental laws,” Tauriq Jenkins, spokesman for the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Traditional Indigenous Council, told The Associated Press.
Jenkins said the area was where Indigenous people in South Africa were also first forced off their land by colonizers and that “more assaults against the Indigenous people” by laying concrete over the site should not be allowed.
From wire reports