First Big U.S. EV-Battery Plant Offers Lessons as Industry Springs Up

After years of training workers and adapting machinery, Panasonic’s battery-production lines now run around the clock churning out some two billion finger-size battery cells a year in a red-and-white facility the size of 90 football fields.

Many battery and auto makers would like to follow. Enticed by federal subsidies, those companies have outlined plans for tens of billions of dollars in factory investments in the U.S.

General Motors Co.

,

Honda Motor Co.

,

Samsung SDI Co.

were among those announcing big plants last year.

“The word ‘gigafactory’ has often been thrown around recently, but just how big one of these is and how many resources it requires is hard to imagine,” said

Yasuaki Takamoto,

the head of Panasonic’s EV battery business. 

People at Panasonic and industry consultants say the early efforts at building EV batteries in the U.S. have shown the ways companies can go astray. One of the biggest issues is training workers in the finicky art of battery making, where the slightest exposure to moisture might mean a whole batch has to be thrown out. 

Also, equipment can’t necessarily be shipped from Asia and plopped onto an American assembly line, given U.S. safety regulations and different operating conditions, while equipment customized for the U.S. is in short supply. Consultants say when auto makers and battery makers try to build batteries jointly, careful planning at the outset is needed to prevent squabbling and missed deadlines.

GM Chief Executive

Mary Barra

last October told Wall Street analysts that a slower-than-expected start at an Ohio battery plant that GM operates with South Korea’s

LG Energy Solution

would cause the auto maker to miss its EV sales target for North America through 2023. 

David Verner, an executive vice president at Gresham Smith, which designs battery facilities for clients in the U.S., said it isn’t unusual to encounter a company that hasn’t worked on a major factory-building project in the past 15 years. 

“For a long time with the kind of outsourcing that was going on in the U.S., you were not building as many large manufacturing plants. And the skill set got smaller and smaller and older and older,” he said. 

Panasonic experienced both first-mover advantages and headaches when it set up shop in Nevada. In its early years operating at what Tesla calls its gigafactory—a term now often used generally for big EV-battery factories—the Japanese company struggled to boost production volumes.

Tesla Chief Executive

Elon Musk

handed Panasonic tough deadlines and at times blamed it for holding back Tesla’s vehicle output. The companies’ joint battery business was in the red for years before eking out a quarterly profit for the first time in late 2019. The joint venture has recently done better as Tesla sales have risen sharply. 

Panasonic’s Mr. Takamoto said the company underestimated the difficulty of shifting lithium ion-battery production outside of East Asia, the industry’s traditional center.

The company was surprised to find that American workers’ hands were sometimes too big to efficiently operate machinery made in Asia, he said. “It sounds like a joke, but these kinds of issues were frequently encountered in the early stages.”

Boosting production took a year or two more than expected because of issues such as training workers without battery experience and adapting equipment and production processes to them, he said.

Panasonic’s battery operations take up more than half of Tesla’s Nevada gigafactory site, about a half-hour drive outside of Reno. The site is surrounded by hills that are dusted with snow in the winter, and wild horses graze close by.

Inside, white corridors the length of more than 20 tennis courts connect various rooms housing long rows of large incubator-resembling machines and batteries whizzing by on belts. Finished batteries are placed on egg-carton-like trays and loaded onto autonomous carts. Then they ride on a track to the other side of the factory, operated separately by Tesla. 

Panasonic says the factory is currently capable of producing 38 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity annually, enough to power about 600,000 standard-range Tesla Model 3s. 

Panasonic is looking to raise output in Nevada, said Mr. Takamoto, without giving specifics. 

The shortage of workers in the state has led Panasonic to develop its biggest expansion plans elsewhere, according to Mr. Takamoto. Last year, the company said it would build a $4 billion plant in De Soto, Kan., which isn’t far from Kansas City and potentially has a larger labor pool to draw from than northern Nevada. Kansas officials offered Panasonic help with educating and recruiting workers, Mr. Takamoto said.

Aided by subsidies included in the U.S. law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, Panasonic is also drawing up plans for an additional plant roughly the size of the one slated for De Soto, with Kansas and Oklahoma studied as potential locations, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Mr. Takamoto said the decision on a location for a potential additional plant would depend on factors including tax incentives and the prospects for attracting workers. 

In Kansas, “we are going to start recruiting and if we are able to recruit more people than we thought, that will contribute to how we think about mapping out further bases,” he said.

Mr. Takamoto predicted the Kansas plant would take less time than the one in Nevada to operate at full steam. “Over six years we have learned so much,” he said. “We now have the benefit of that.”

Write to River Davis at river.davis@wsj.com

After years of training workers and adapting machinery, Panasonic’s battery-production lines now run around the clock churning out some two billion finger-size battery cells a year in a red-and-white facility the size of 90 football fields.

Many battery and auto makers would like to follow. Enticed by federal subsidies, those companies have outlined plans for tens of billions of dollars in factory investments in the U.S.

General Motors Co.

,

Honda Motor Co.

,

Samsung SDI Co.

were among those announcing big plants last year.

“The word ‘gigafactory’ has often been thrown around recently, but just how big one of these is and how many resources it requires is hard to imagine,” said

Yasuaki Takamoto,

the head of Panasonic’s EV battery business. 

People at Panasonic and industry consultants say the early efforts at building EV batteries in the U.S. have shown the ways companies can go astray. One of the biggest issues is training workers in the finicky art of battery making, where the slightest exposure to moisture might mean a whole batch has to be thrown out. 

Also, equipment can’t necessarily be shipped from Asia and plopped onto an American assembly line, given U.S. safety regulations and different operating conditions, while equipment customized for the U.S. is in short supply. Consultants say when auto makers and battery makers try to build batteries jointly, careful planning at the outset is needed to prevent squabbling and missed deadlines.

GM Chief Executive

Mary Barra

last October told Wall Street analysts that a slower-than-expected start at an Ohio battery plant that GM operates with South Korea’s

LG Energy Solution

would cause the auto maker to miss its EV sales target for North America through 2023. 

David Verner, an executive vice president at Gresham Smith, which designs battery facilities for clients in the U.S., said it isn’t unusual to encounter a company that hasn’t worked on a major factory-building project in the past 15 years. 

“For a long time with the kind of outsourcing that was going on in the U.S., you were not building as many large manufacturing plants. And the skill set got smaller and smaller and older and older,” he said. 

Panasonic experienced both first-mover advantages and headaches when it set up shop in Nevada. In its early years operating at what Tesla calls its gigafactory—a term now often used generally for big EV-battery factories—the Japanese company struggled to boost production volumes.

Tesla Chief Executive

Elon Musk

handed Panasonic tough deadlines and at times blamed it for holding back Tesla’s vehicle output. The companies’ joint battery business was in the red for years before eking out a quarterly profit for the first time in late 2019. The joint venture has recently done better as Tesla sales have risen sharply. 

Panasonic’s Mr. Takamoto said the company underestimated the difficulty of shifting lithium ion-battery production outside of East Asia, the industry’s traditional center.

The company was surprised to find that American workers’ hands were sometimes too big to efficiently operate machinery made in Asia, he said. “It sounds like a joke, but these kinds of issues were frequently encountered in the early stages.”

Boosting production took a year or two more than expected because of issues such as training workers without battery experience and adapting equipment and production processes to them, he said.

Panasonic’s battery operations take up more than half of Tesla’s Nevada gigafactory site, about a half-hour drive outside of Reno. The site is surrounded by hills that are dusted with snow in the winter, and wild horses graze close by.

Inside, white corridors the length of more than 20 tennis courts connect various rooms housing long rows of large incubator-resembling machines and batteries whizzing by on belts. Finished batteries are placed on egg-carton-like trays and loaded onto autonomous carts. Then they ride on a track to the other side of the factory, operated separately by Tesla. 

Panasonic says the factory is currently capable of producing 38 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity annually, enough to power about 600,000 standard-range Tesla Model 3s. 

Panasonic is looking to raise output in Nevada, said Mr. Takamoto, without giving specifics. 

The shortage of workers in the state has led Panasonic to develop its biggest expansion plans elsewhere, according to Mr. Takamoto. Last year, the company said it would build a $4 billion plant in De Soto, Kan., which isn’t far from Kansas City and potentially has a larger labor pool to draw from than northern Nevada. Kansas officials offered Panasonic help with educating and recruiting workers, Mr. Takamoto said.

Aided by subsidies included in the U.S. law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, Panasonic is also drawing up plans for an additional plant roughly the size of the one slated for De Soto, with Kansas and Oklahoma studied as potential locations, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Mr. Takamoto said the decision on a location for a potential additional plant would depend on factors including tax incentives and the prospects for attracting workers. 

In Kansas, “we are going to start recruiting and if we are able to recruit more people than we thought, that will contribute to how we think about mapping out further bases,” he said.

Mr. Takamoto predicted the Kansas plant would take less time than the one in Nevada to operate at full steam. “Over six years we have learned so much,” he said. “We now have the benefit of that.”

Write to River Davis at river.davis@wsj.com