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94.3 the Wolf Country That'll Make You Howl!
Four days after the announcement that Ford and SK On would be dissolving their joint venture for battery factories, the Detroit automaker announced a shift in focus that will result in a new operation at the Glendale facilities and the loss of 1,600 jobs.
In a release published by the company Monday, Ford announced “a series of actions to sharpen its Ford+ plan, executing a decisive redeployment of capital to meet customer demand and drive profitable growth.”
Those actions include the repurposing of the Kentucky One and Kentucky Two BlueOval SK plants in Glendale “to serve the rapidly growing battery energy storage systems market.” Ford says the change “will leverage currently underutilized electric vehicle battery capacity to create a new, diversified, and profitable revenue stream for Ford.” Ford plans to convert the facilities from an electric vehicle battery plant to produce advanced battery energy storage systems. Ford says they plan to produce “LFP prismatic cells, battery energy storage system modules, and 20-foot DC container systems” at the facility.
Ford says it will invest $2 billion over the next two years to develop the new operation, which they plan to bring online within 18 months. While Ford says the energy storage facility will include 2,100 jobs, Ford executives said in a call with media that current operations at BlueOval SK will cease and the plant’s 1,600 workers will be laid off. A timeframe for the layoffs was not announced, but Ford said the laid off workers would have the opportunity to apply for the new operation.
The original BlueOval SK announcement from September 2021 reported the project to be a $5.8 billion investment which would lead to approximately 5,000 new jobs. BlueOval SK announced the production of their first battery in August.
Aaron Taylor came on board as the Hardin County Schools Performing Arts Center’s technical director in 2005, but he will be moving into a different office soon as HCS has announced Taylor as the PAC’s new director. Taylor said getting selected was “extremely humbling.” “I’ve been here for 20 years, and I knew from the second that I walked in here, before I even worked here when I used to […]
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