By City of Buckeye
KORE Power held three meetings late last month to share the latest updates on the planned 2MSF KOREPlex and to answer questions from local businesses and residents.
KORE started its day of meetings at the Buckeye Valley Chamber of Commerce’s Quarterly Breakfast. More than 90 attendees joined the Chamber meeting. Then the company held two public meetings at City Hall at 3 P.M. and 6 P.M. About 30 people comprising city staff, officials and local residents attended the two meetings and asked questions about traffic impact and water use by the facility.
At the meetings, Lindsay Gorrill, co-founder and CEO of KORE Power, gave a presentation that included new details including:
- The KOREPlex facility has grown from 1MSF to 2MSF;
- The costs of the project as grown to $1.25B from $1B;
- The project will break ground this year;
- Operations will begin in 2024 with hiring likely ramping up in Q3 2023;
- KORE Power is committed to supporting the KOREPlex with a US-based supply chain.
Gorrill said the KOREPlex represents the first domestic lithium-ion Gigafactory owned by a U.S. company, which will manufacture U.S.-owned intellectual property.
At all three meetings, questions fell into two general areas – the jobs the project would bring to Buckeye and the environmental impact of the project, ranging from water usage to traffic.
He said the facility will open with two lines which will each require about 750 jobs. An additional two lines will be added in the future with another 1,500 jobs, including supervisors and senior staff, which will bring total hiring to 3,000 positions. KORE, he said, has already added seven team members who have re-located or will be re-locating to Buckeye.
The team being assembled, he said, has tremendous experience operating safe battery factories in the US.
Gorrill said that KORE’s goal is to make the KOREPlex the world’s first net zero Gigafactory by using on-site solar, then adding co-generation capacity in the future through energy storage.
Randy Cowder, KORE Power’s Sr. VP of manufacturing, who recently moved to the area, said lithium-ion battery manufacturing is not a water-intensive process.
Cowder said KORE has commissioned a traffic study and will stagger shifts allowing the company to mitigate any potential traffic issues. (Source)