Honeywell Aerospace recently hosted a roundtable event — “Powering Arizona: Maximizing Historic Federal Investment for a Clean Economy” — at its Advanced Air Mobility Lab in Phoenix. With representatives from Honeywell, Microsoft, Lucid Motors, KORE Power and other major employers in the state, along with Blaise Caudill, energy policy advisor at the Governor’s Office of Resiliency, it provided an opportunity for public- and private-sector leaders to discuss their plans to leverage federal clean energy legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 to maximize clean energy investment in Arizona to benefit our economy and the climate.
Noting that Honeywell has a long-time presence in Arizona and employs approximately 10,000 people here, David Shilliday, general manager of Honeywell’s Advanced Air Mobility, says, “The ecosystem we need to create to make sure Arizona remains at the center of a clean economy requires not just establishing the facilities but the workforce of the future.” In that regard, Honeywell is deeply involved in STEM activities with Mesa public schools as well as through the Arizona Diamondbacks STEM challenges and local universities “to ensure there are opportunities for developing the curricula for what we think the future needs are.”
Relative to clean energy, Honeywell is committed to improving the state of its own operations, and has already reduced it emissions by 90% toward its goal of net zero by 2025. And Shilliday points to facilities upgrades, including Honeywell’s legacy Engines campus “moving to utilizing more of its footprint for hydrogen development, whether fuel cell development or hydrogen combustion.”
“Since passage of Inflation Reduction Act, clean energy manufacturing announcements have gone into hyperdrive,” says Edwin Hernández-Vargas, manager of state and local affairs at KORE Power. KORE’s announced factory in Buckeye was one of the first — not just for Arizona but the United States, he notes.
“We were founded in 2018 with one goal: to onshore the manufacturing of lithium battery cells that power vehicles and also allow us to store clean energy sources like wind and solar, so that power is available when we need it,” Hernández-Vargas says, pointing out that, back then, people questioned whether that was even a possibility because at the time so much of battery cell production was happening in Asia. “As we stand here today, we’re turning that tide. The U.S. is now the world’s growth leader in new battery manufacturing facilities.”
KORE broke ground on its KOREplex in Buckeye late last year and expects it to be operational in 2025 — a 1.3-million-gigawatt manufacturing facility that will create 1,250 jobs in Phase I and produce an annual capacity of about six or seven gigawatt-hours-worth of battery cell technology.
Of even broader impact is KORE’s focus on creating an ecosystem in clean energy. “As we continue to build out the KOREplex in Buckeye, we’re looking forward to being an anchor that will attract other suppliers and manufacturers here to Arizona,” says Hernández-Vargas. “We’re having conversations with the companies that create the materials that we use but also the companies that will use the batteries that we produce. We’re also having conversations with those companies that will recycle those batteries so that those materials can go back into other products.
“When we talk to those companies about what’s happening here, they get really excited,” he continues. “Not just about the logistics of being here in Arizona and also the business climate that exists. They also — almost as importantly — get excited about our academic institutions.” He cites Arizona State, which continues to push the envelope in battery energy storage as well as advancing the next generation of technologies that make batteries safer, last longer and are more efficient, and job training opportunities like those that exist at West MEC.
KORE Power’s goal, Hernández-Vargas says, is to “build a clean, safe, reliable electric grid — with a stamp that says, ‘Made in the USA.’”
Governor Hobbs established the Office of Resiliency to provide a focused office for energy, water, land use and transportation, seeing, Caudill notes, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attract federal dollars through the bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. In fact, Arizona has emerged as one of the nation’s top destinations for clean energy investment. Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed into law in the summer of 2022, the state has already secured more than $10 billion in new clean energy investments, which are projected to create more than 13,500 new jobs.
“Powering Arizona: Maximizing Historic Federal Investment for a Clean Economy” was organized by Ceres, Advanced Energy United and the Arizona Technology Council.
Did You Know: Notable clean energy projects in Arizona include KORE Power’s KOREPlex 1.3-million-gigawatt battery facility in Buckeye, in partnership with Siemens; the $5.6-billion LG Energy Solutions gigafactory in Queen Creek; and American Battery’s gigafactory in Tucson, which is expected to employ 1,000.
