Friday, December 15, 2017

Battery plant in Appalachia to hire 875 at $39/hr.

A bright spot in the economic gloom of the Central Appalachian coalfield just got brighter. Pikeville, a town of 7,000 near Kentucky's eastern tip, "will get 875 jobs paying an average of $39 per hour when a planned $372 million advanced battery-manufacturing facility opens in the next few years," says The Lane Report, a Kentucky business publication.

EnerBlu Inc. will built a 1 million-square-foot plant to make lithium-titanate batteries for transit buses, commercial trucks, military vehicles and other equipment. "Construction is scheduled to start in mid-2018 and the facility’s opening is planned for 2020," says a press release from Gov., Matt Bevin. The company will get up to $30 million in state economic development incentives.

"It’s a big win for state officials and Eastern Kentucky, which has lost thousand of high-paying coal mining jobs in recent years," The Lane Report notes. "EnerBlu also considered Nevada, Utah and Washington as potential locations for the project." The company is "focused on energy storage for military and commercial vehicle applications," it says. It will relocate its headquarters to Lexington, Ky., from Riverside, Calif.

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