Show me the money (& jobs)
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Show me the money (& jobs)
Visualizing the job creation and funding received by US battery company awardees
Performing a meta-analysis on recent US Department of Energy funding recipients. If you enjoy this newsletter, give us a share and subscribe!
By now you must have heard about the massive funding boosts to 30+ American battery companies, provided by the US government. $2.8 billion went to 21 domestic battery manufacturing projects through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). The BIL also included $74 million for 10 battery recycling and reuse projects. At the beginning of this year, $42 million was announced for 12 projects to work on next-generation batteries for electric vehicles (EVs4All). An additional $675 million has also been earmarked to expand domestic critical material supply chains.
The grant-receiving projects cover the entire battery landscape: Anode, cathode, separator, and electrolyte component manufacturing. Raw mineral and precursor refining. Recycling and second-life use cases. Solid state batteries. Sodium metal. Potassium ion electrolytes. Sulfur cathodes. To name a few.
Battery manufacturing awards provide public grant funding that has to be matched to some degree by private investment. For example, Sila Nano received $100M in Federal money, and they have agreed also to put up $300M in private cost share to create an EV-scale silicon anode production plant.
Another specific intention of the funding is to create high-quality jobs. In fact, the US Department of Energy (DOE) also created a $5M pilot-training program called the Lithium-Battery Workforce Initiative.
Show me the money (& jobs)
We thought it might be interesting to chart and visualize the grant funding and job creation, given that most analysis has focused on listing the companies and money in table/pdf form.
Plotting where companies are relative to each other reveals some interesting trends and outliers:
How does the funding split compare between government and private contributions?
Did more money go to larger companies with more employees?
How big are companies, relative to how many new people they’re hiring?
Are companies that were funded more by the government also hiring more?
Here’s where we talk about the caveats on the methodology used to generate the charts: while the private and federal funding data was published by the DOE, company employee headcounts and publically-posted job listings (as you may guess) are far more fluid and subjective. Company employee headcounts here were pulled from LinkedIn, accessed 2023-02-20. For the number of job listings, the maximum number was used when comparing job postings on Linkedin, the own company's career website, and the first alternative when searching for jobs at the said company via google. Again, job listing figures were current only on 2023-02-20. Employee counts and job advertisements, even when numbers are accurate, can only be circumstantially interpreted to have some relation with overall company performance.
A full list of company names and their logos can be found at the end of this article.
1. Public vs private project funding split
In Fig 1. we can see the fraction of Federal government funding, compared to the total funding (public + private) that is going to a specific project. The three shaded regions show how the differences in the three funding initiatives: Manufacturing BIL, Recycling BIL, and Nex-gen EVs4All.
For the Next-gen EVs4All companies, the grant also stipulates a 20% cost-share requirement, so in most cases, 80% of the project funding was awarded by the government.
The horizontal line at “fraction of govt. funding” = 0.5 represents where the US government has provided 1:1 public money matching with private investment. For basically all of these companies, 1:1 is the highest possible government contribution ratio.
Princeton NuEnergy (orange highlight in Fig.1 ) is the only exception here. Princeton NuEnergy has a private cost share of $2M, while the government has given them $10M. Their project is on the recycling of battery components.
On the other end of the spectrum lies Novonix and Entek. Novonix is putting up $877M themselves to receive $150M from the Govt, and Entek is putting up a whopping $1.2B for $200M. They’ll be developing manufacturing for synthetic graphite and separators, respectively.
2. Govt. funding vs company size
In Fig 2. we see that no single company received more than $250M (gray shading) from the US government, regardless of whether they had 10 or 10,000 employees.
Oh, wait, except for Ascend Elements.
Ascend Elements has somehow gotten $480M in public grants in these recent funding rounds. This spans 3 separate projects on the production of cathode precursors, cathode active materials, and cathode recycling. With a LinkedIn headcount of approx. 100 people, that’s a lot of runway for growth.
3. Company size relative to hiring trends
We know that the Federal government wants their investment to go toward job creation. So how many new people are these companies hiring, compared to their current headcount?
From Fig 3. we can see a correlation that bigger companies are generally hiring for more open roles. This trend is highlighted in the gray shading.
Maybe we’re being a bit mean now, but we’ll call out Novonix and Syrah Technologies. These two graphite companies — both with over 100 employees — now have over $1B and $400M in funding, yet they are only advertising for 3 and 2 open jobs each. It’s expected that more roles will probably be brought on in the near future.
4. Total project funding vs growth factor
If we have the total of open jobs and the total of current employees, we can define a “headcount growth factor”:
From Fig. 4 we can see that most companies are not hiring more than 50% of their current employee base. There really doesn’t seem to be any correlation between funding size and the current new hiring rate.
For cathode producer and recycler Ascend Elements, their “special treatment” shown in Fig 2. has translated into a large headcount growth rate.
Ampcera is looking to almost double in size, as they currently have a small team working on thermally-modulated solid-state batteries.
So now we’ve seen the money and the jobs, we’ve also been shown some interesting outliers and trends that have emerged. Again, before jumping to any conclusions, we would treat these observations as mere curiosities without any formal deep analyses. Our assumptions and caveats are stated in the intro section of this post :)
The index of company names and logos can be found here:
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In the original post, we incorrectly stated that 100% of the EVs4All program was funded by the government. Thank you to our readers for pointing out our mistake - the 20% cost share is now also reflected in updated figures 1 and 4. The funding opportunity announcement also specifies exceptions to this rule.