The Alliston area is set to get charged up with $15 billion in electric vehicle investments as carmaker Honda said it will join two other companies and open an EV battery plant in Ontario with monetary help from the government.
The planned Honda electric vehicle battery production facility will be built adjacent to its current vehicle plant and is expected to add 1,000 jobs to the 4,200 Honda employees in Alliston, the company said Thursday. When fully operational, "the EV plant will have a production capacity of 240,000 EVs per year and the EV battery plant will have a capacity of 36 [gigawatt hours] per year," Honda said.
Alliston, with about 23,000 residents, is about a 90-minute car ride from Toronto. It's set to host a project divided into four components: an electric vehicle assembly plant, a battery plant, a battery processing plant operated in partnership with South Korean steel maker POSCO Future M. Co. and a separator plant in a joint venture with the Japanese multinational chemical company Asahi Kasei.
The federal government is expected to chip in $2.5 billion for the project through tax incentives, while the Ontario government offers the same amount in direct subsidies.
The Honda plant will become the third electrical vehicle battery plant in Ontario, following Volkswagen in St. Thomas and the Stellantis-LG plant in Windsor. The federal government committed to providing performance incentives of about $15 billion to Stellantis and LG over 10 years, while making a similar deal with Volkswagen for $13 billion.
Honda has been the biggest private employer in Simcoe County since it opened in 1986. The plant has helped create many jobs in related industries such as trucking and parts manufacturing. The Volkswagen and Stellantis LG plants are both located in the heavily populated region southwest of Toronto, while Alliston is set in a more rural area north of Toronto.
Ontario is not the only province to seek to woo the electric vehicle manufacturing industry. Quebec has also made efforts to become a major force in the field, with its upcoming Northvolt electric vehicle battery plant south of Montreal and a variety of facilities at the provincially-owned Bécancour industrial park near Trois-Rivières.
Quebec Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon told reporters this week that the government had sought to entice Honda to the province but was unable to guarantee a supply of electricity required for the project.