The Electric: The Next Hurdle for a U.S. Battery Industry: Talent

For more than a year, automobile and battery manufacturers have fretted over a stark shortage of raw materials, and how that will prevent them from making all the electric vehicles they plan this decade. This week we look at another major bottleneck they are wrestling with: labor. The U.S. and Europe simply don't have enough people who know how to make batteries. 

Last year, battery manufacturer Kore Power hired Randy Cowder, a veteran of Tesla’s flagship gigafactory outside Reno, Nev., to design, build and operate a new battery plant near Phoenix that will be capable of equipping about 200,000 electric vehicles a year. For Cowder, it was a superlatively challenging assignment given the lack of experience in the U.S. with lithium-ion manufacturing, and the paucity of people in the country who know how to make batteries. So as a first step, Cowder did the obvious thing: He went back to the factory from which he came, the Tesla gigafactory, run by Panasonic, and poached four senior colleagues for his core leadership team.

Today, Cowder and his colleagues spend their days designing Kore’s 12 gigawatt-hour plant—and trying to figure out where they will find the 3,000 workers they’ll need to build and run it.

Until now, the West’s EV and battery industries have fretted mostly over how they will build battery gigafactories fast enough and find sufficient raw materials such as nickel and lithium to make the batteries work. But another concern is equally worrisome: Even with enough factories and raw materials, where will the U.S. and Europe find the estimated hundreds of thousands of workers required to mine the metals, process them and build the necessary batteries? At a time of a 3.7% jobless rate in the U.S., the scarcity of workers has emerged as another bottleneck threatening the industry’s ability to make anywhere near as many EVs as it plans this decade.