Kentucky: A US battery startup that scrapped plans to make Kentucky the site of its first factory has instead built it in China, exposing the limits of President Donald Trump's efforts to lure manufacturing home just as he welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping for a summit.
EnerVenue starts production at its manufacturing facility in the eastern Chinese city of Changzhou on Thursday, the same day Trump meets Xi in Washington, as relations between the superpowers remain strained by a tariff war the US president launched partly to bring back manufacturing and jobs.
Henning Rath, EnerVenue's chief executive, who joined the company in April, said building in China was a condition of his taking the job.
Without the China plant, he said, “it would be very difficult with the capital available to showcase that this factory can go into scale.”
EnerVenue, which has its research and development department in Fremont, California and was founded by Stanford materials science professor Yi Cui, makes nickel-hydrogen batteries derived from the technology NASA used in the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station.
It announced a Kentucky factory plan in 2023 with a first phase costing $264 million and creating 450 jobs, but abandoned it a year later.
Rath, speaking as engineers tested spinning hydraulic arms and lidar-guided robots ferried materials between production stations, said the attempted project was a “valuable learning experience,” but the technology wasn’t yet ready.
But he stressed that China is the “factory of factories” and “an important stepping stone” towards global production.
Asked whether EnerVenue would open a US plant, Rath said, “We want to play in the North American market. It depends a little bit now on legislation and regulation.”