In Michigan, LG opens one of America’s biggest battery cell factories

LANSING, Mich. — The Trump administration has made clear its disdain for electric vehicles and clean energy. Yet at the grand opening of South Korea–based LG Energy Solution’s latest battery manufacturing facility, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum cheered the factory as a fulfillment of the president’s agenda.

“That’s the American energy dominance in action, which is more jobs, strong allies, secure supply chains — and right here, that’s happening,” Burgum said Tuesday during the Lansing factory’s opening ceremony.

LG executives have framed the plant’s opening in similar terms, echoing the administration’s focus on energy security and the importance of making the tech in the U.S., given that China produces most of the world’s batteries.

And like many of its peers in the industry, LG has adapted wide swaths of its Lansing site, originally meant only for EV batteries, to make what is proving to be a more politically palatable technology: energy storage systems for power grids.

“No matter which side of the aisle you’re on, there’s a desire to have energy independence and to meet load growth,” said Devon Wilson, vice president of sales and marketing for LG’s U.S. energy storage division.

LG invested more than $2 billion into building its new Lansing plant, which currently employs 900 people and plans to hire approximately 800 more.

Once at full capacity next year, the facility is expected to produce more than 35 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually, according to Anthony O’Donovan, the plant’s operations director. That would make it one of the biggest domestic plants producing cells, which are the individual building blocks of battery systems, LG Energy Solution spokesperson Phil Lienert confirmed.

From Lansing, the cells will go to plants across the country — including both to clients and to one of LG’s own facilities in Holland, Michigan — to be connected together to form battery modules, which are then arranged into battery packs, Lienert said.

This domestic network of battery manufacturing is very new, and arriving just as battery energy storage systems themselves grow at a rapid clip. The U.S. didn’t make any of its own battery cells until 2025, when companies including LG added a total of 20 GWh of manufacturing capacity, according to the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition, an industry group.

By the end of this year, the coalition expects that figure to increase nearly fivefold, to 96 GWh of cell production capacity.

Diversifying beyond EVs

The Lansing facility was first announced in 2022 as part of Ultium Cells, a joint venture between LG and General Motors to source battery cells for the Michigan automaker’s EVs.

By 2024, however, consumer interest in EVs was lagging, and President Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to slash federal support for the vehicles. At the end of that year, GM sold its stake in the Lansing factory to LG, making the Korean company the site’s full owner.

The Trump administration has since eliminated the $7,500 tax credit for consumers who purchase EVs and canceled more than $700 million in federal funds for battery and EV manufacturing projects. (It did, however, preserve tax credits for clean energy manufacturing facilities and for the installation of stationary storage systems.)

By the end of 2025, dozens of battery and EV manufacturing projects were canceled nationwide, totaling more than $21 billion in lost investment, according to a report from E2, a clean energy advocacy group. Michigan, which had banked on exactly these types of projects to grow its economy, given its automotive prowess, was hit the hardest.

So, LG leaders decided to embrace a more promising sector: energy storage.

In the last few years, energy demand in the U.S. has surged in part because of the massive data centers being built for the artificial intelligence boom. Battery storage systems are well-positioned not only to swiftly meet tech companies’ demand for power, but also to absorb the sharp dips and spikes in energy usage inherent to AI data centers, Wilson said.

“It’s a great situation for us,” Wilson said. ​“We’ve seen an explosion in the size of the ESS [energy storage system] market, so we’ve really been able to grow our demand.”

In just four years, the amount of battery storage capacity in the U.S. has increased nearly tenfold, from 4.7 gigawatts in 2021 to 43.6 gigawatts at the end of 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

This year, developers have already built 8.2 gigawatts of battery storage nationwide, according to the EIA — a statistic that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a prominent Democrat, hailed as ​“amazing” at the opening of LG’s Lansing factory.

She also referenced Michigan’s ​“historic clean energy law” that requires 2.5 gigawatts of battery storage, which are often installed alongside solar farms to help stretch the carbon-free energy into other times of the day, by 2030.

“Michigan is poised to take advantage of this growth,” Whitmer said.

From one customer to many

In line with market shifts, the Lansing plant has diversified so that it will produce roughly half EV battery cells and half energy storage cells, according to Bob Lee, the North American president of LG Energy Solution.

The EV battery cells will no longer go to GM, but to Toyota. And the plant will produce nickel-manganese-cobalt cells, which are more energy-dense, according to LG’s press release.

Meanwhile, the energy storage cells have been contracted by a variety of offtakers, including renewable-project developer Terra-Gen and Korean clean energy manufacturer Qcells, LG spokesperson Lienert said. These cells will be lithium-iron phosphate, which isn’t as energy-dense as other chemistries but has less of a fire risk.

Next year, as the Lansing facility ramps up, it is also expected to supply Tesla’s Megapack 3 factory in Houston, an agreement that Lienert confirmed but would not elaborate on.

First reported by Reuters last summer, the $4.3 billion LG-Tesla deal was officially announced in March — but by the Trump administration as part of its focus on energy security, not by the companies.

Now that it’s up and running, the Lansing facility joins LG’s growing portfolio of cell manufacturing sites. The Korean company still runs two Ultium EV battery plants with GM, one in Tennessee, another in Ohio.

Last year, LG expanded its flagship Michigan site in Holland, which in 2012 became the first in the U.S. to make EV batteries, to also produce energy storage battery cells and packs.

And this March, LG held a grand opening for its facility in Windsor, Ontario — the first commercial-scale battery manufacturing plant in Canada as well as the company’s largest North American plant, Lienert said.

“We’ve almost got a perfect latitudinal line now that extends from Holland through Lansing to Windsor,” Lienert said. ​“We think of this as being the belt of ESS battery manufacturing for North America.”