North America Becomes the Fastest-Growing Regional Market for New Battery Facilities in 2022

As per the Market Intelligence Report by Clean Energy Associates, North America became the growth leader for planned new battery cell manufacturing factories in 2022. This report provides a thorough review of the energy storage supplier landscape.

Fastest-Growing Market for New Battery Plants

Clean Energy Associates released its Energy Storage System Supplier Market Intelligence Report, which is a review of the energy storage supply landscape, featuring sixteen cell supplier capacity forecasts' in-depth analysis, shipment volumes, and ten integrator overviews. Solar Power World reported that this review revealed a new record for North America.

North America had become the growing regional market for planned new lithium battery cell manufacturing plants, with much of this growth attributable to incentives from the United States Inflation Reduction Act.

Meanwhile, CEA revealed that Europe faced delays and cancellations of several planned production facilities because of high energy prices and more attractive policy support from other regional markets. China is still the leading battery cell manufacturing hub, but CEA predicts that its share will decline in the coming years.

CEA stated on its website that the Energy Storage System Supplier Market Intelligence Program will offer a twice-a-year independent market intelligence about the world's top lithium-ion cell manufacturers and integrators of energy storage systems.

Since the expansion of the ESS market will enable the growth of Tier II/III suppliers who are currently unable to deliver for buyers in particular, increased market fragmentation is expected. The report of CEA also forecasts that the global lithium-ion battery cell nameplate capacity will triple its amount by 2025.

Causing the Surge

According to a report from Electrek, the recently released review asserts that the incentives offered by President Joe Biden Administration's Inflation Reduction Act are the main cause for the surge in the increasing number of North America battery factories.

Examples include Ford and CATL's announcement in February last year of building a $3.5 billion 35 GWh lithium iron phosphate cell facility in Michigan by 2026, BMW and Envision's announcement in October of building a $700 million 30 GWh battery factory in South Carolina, and the Canada-Based Electrovaya's first US EV battery plant in New York costing $75 million.

In just a year, global EV battery usage increased by 72% from 2021 to 2022. CEA goes forward with a forecast of an impressive two-year 186% growth rate on the 1,706 GWh of batteries produced last year.

Adding to this is that the Internation Energy Agency's Global EV Outlook reported that EV sales also exceeded 10 million last year as 14% of all new cars sold were electric. It increased to around 9% in 2021 and less than 5% in 2020. With these numbers, battery and EV manufacturing are going to continue to increase year by year and will experience huge growth in the future.