Shortly before that announcement, Ford had ended an EV battery joint venture (JV) with South Korean battery maker SK On, called BlueOval SK. Upon its conclusion, Ford took ownership of two Kentucky factories operated under the JV.
At one of those, in Glendale, the company intends to invest around US$2 billion to establish production lines for prismatic lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells and DC BESS enclosures. Ford Energy is planning for the first deliveries to begin in late 2027.
At another BlueOval SK site in Michigan, Ford Energy plans to add residential battery storage production lines.
Flagship product Ford Energy DC block is a standardised 20-foot ISO containerised BESS designed around 512Ah LFP cells and available in 2-hour and 4-hour configurations.
Ford claimed it projects annual manufacturing capacity of the DC block to each 20GWh. Each liquid-cooled unit comes with 5.45MWh rated energy, weighing around 43.5 tonnes.
The company said LFP technology is proven at scale in the BESS industry worldwide, while its cell-to-container vertical integration business model will deliver stronger quality control and traceability.
It’s also important to note that being fully assembled in the US means Ford Energy’s products are expected to qualify as compliant with foreign entity of concern (FEOC) or prohibited foreign entity (PFE) restrictions on US tax credit availability and will also qualify for domestic content bonuses.
In a post on Ford’s corporate blog, Ford Energy president Lisa Drake said the company had “operated quietly to build a foundation for this business,” for the better part of a year.
“US demand for dispatchable, bankable energy storage is accelerating. The convergence of data centre growth, renewable energy integration, and grid resilience requirements has created a gap in the market,” Drake, who was appointed in January, said.
‘Made in America’ advantage for Ford’s ‘big strategic pivot’
FEOC and PFE rules introduced in last year’s H.R.1 ‘One, Big Beautiful Bill Act’ legislation mean projects using Chinese-made or funded components and investment over a certain investment value threshold will not qualify for the upstream production tax credit (PTC) or downstream investment tax credit (ITC) incentives.
As detailed in an ESN Premium article yesterday, two major Chinese clean energy companies, Envision Energy and JinkoSolar, have recently sold majority stakes in US manufacturing facilities.
This, lawyer Mona Dajani of Cooley’s told ESN Premium, represented “the US clean energy supply chain becoming recapitalised and politically restructured as the market starts to price, and take steps to mitigate, FEOC and related risks,” although it does not mean Chinese firms are leaving the market entirely, Dajani said.
Meanwhile, as US developers and utilities scramble to secure non-Chinese and domestic content supply chains for their BESS project pipelines, EV battery manufacturers like LG Energy Solution (LG ES), Samsung SDI and Ford’s former BlueOval SK partner SK On have been repurposing substantial portions of already-built EV battery production lines in the US to make cells catering for BESS demand.
With the EV tax credit ended last September, combined with the weakening of emissions standards and other pro-EV policies coming to an end, US automakers would see little incentive to produce electric vehicles if they could make more from internal combustion engines (ICE), Pete Tillotson, senior research analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s BESS & EV battery division Rho Motion told ESN Premium in December.
Speaking about Ford’s bet on BESS, Tillotson said the company “has access to battery manufacturing facilities that could be better used serving a stronger growth market in energy storage.”
“For a new player to enter with zero experience in the energy storage market, it is a big strategic pivot,” Tillotson said.
“However, when looking at battery demand dynamics, particularly in the US, it begins to make sense.”
The question remains whether a new entrant, albeit one with a household name, can hold its own in an increasingly competitive BESS market.
In February, Julian Nebreda, CEO of BESS technology provider Fluence, was asked whether he saw “any increased competition from the likes of Ford.”
In an earnings call to discuss quarterly financial results for the period ending 31 December, Nebreda said Fluence did not see any “real changes in the competitive environment,” but did see developments such as Ford’s pivot from EV to BESS cell manufacturing as a “real change” in the way supply enters the market.
In the rest of the world outside the US, Nebreda said, Fluence competes with Chinese companies that benefit from state backing.
“So here [in the US], competing against some of these players, I don’t think it will be more difficult than what we do globally,” the CEO said.