The Michigan battery plant GM left is now making cells for Toyota and the grid

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stood in Delta Township on August 18 and treated a factory General Motors no longer wanted as a win. "That's the American energy dominance in action, which is more jobs, strong allies, secure supply chains — and right here, that's happening," he told the opening of LG Energy Solution's new Lansing plant.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer shared the dais. In LG's release she called the state "open for business and creating good-paying jobs building the future of cars, chips, and batteries." On WLNS 6 News she added a figure: national battery capacity, she said, rose 60 percent from 2025 to 2026. "That's pretty incredible."

The building's survival is the news. LG and GM broke ground in 2022 as Ultium Cells, a joint venture built to feed GM's electric cars. By 2024 consumer interest in EVs was lagging and Donald Trump was campaigning on gutting federal support for them; at the end of that year GM sold its stake, leaving LG the sole owner. The $7,500 consumer credit died later, once the administration was in office. The Korean battery maker kept the 226-acre campus, more than $2 billion already spent, and a hole where the original customer used to be.

Bob Lee, LG Energy Solution's North America president, told Automotive News Daily Drive what that looked like on the floor. "Initially the assumption was that you're going to have a single customer, your joint venture partner, and a lot of your programs and line production plans was designed around their vehicle launch platform and roadmap." After the sale, "we had to really open up and convince many other customers."

"Initially it was very challenging," Lee said. "When you're looking at a situation where you've lost your main customer, but when you go through the difficulty of building up this business, I would say you end up in a very healthy situation because you have a nice portfolio of customers. You have automotive as well as ESS."

ESS is energy storage: stationary packs for utilities, data centres and grid operators. That market made the ribbon-cutting politically easy. Washington has spent a year scorning electric cars while still celebrating batteries that sit beside substations. Canary Media reported that the administration cancelled more than $700 million in battery and EV manufacturing awards and ended the $7,500 consumer EV credit, while leaving manufacturing and stationary-storage incentives in place. An E2 tally in that reporting put cancelled projects at more than $21 billion by the end of 2025, with Michigan hit hardest.

Lee told Automotive News the split is roughly 50/50. The car half is nickel-manganese-cobalt cells for Toyota, starting with the 2027 Highlander EV assembled in Georgetown, Kentucky. InsideEVs reporter Suvrat Kothari, who toured the 2.8-million-square-foot building, wrote that the same cells could also feed the related Subaru Getaway and Lexus TZ. An LG executive told WLNS what that side of the plant is aiming at: "We're looking for high energy density, affordable combination. I feel very confident that LG is going to be well positioned to compete in that market."

The storage half is lithium-iron-phosphate. Pouch cells leave Lansing for LG's Holland, Michigan plant to be packed into systems. Detroit's DTE Energy is an early utility buyer; Canary Media also named Terra-Gen and Qcells as offtakers. Dedicated lines are expected next year to feed Tesla's Megapack 3 factory in Houston under a $4.3 billion supply agreement the White House announced in March as an energy-security deal, not a vehicle deal. Kothari, recapping the tour on camera, drew the line: the Tesla cells "are not going into Tesla vehicles. These are going into the Megapacks."

Headcount is about 900 now and 1,700 at full scale, the number Michigan wrote into its incentive deal. Annual output is supposed to top 35 GWh. LG says it has invested more than $5 billion in Michigan since 2010 and will employ more than 3,300 people in the state by year-end.

Lee told reporters at the plant that switching an EV line to LFP storage cells is not a software change. "It's not easy. LFP coating is thicker and then there are slight differences in the manufacturing process, so you do need to put in some new equipment and validate them in order to build batteries."

Weight barely matters in a container parked beside a substation, so cheaper, heavier iron-phosphate wins. The battery-management software has to do work a car never asks for. In storage, Lee told Daily Drive, that system "becomes a foundation for your energy trading strategy" — when to buy power, how much, at what price.

Devon Wilson, vice president of sales and marketing for LG's U.S. energy storage division, described the demand that paid for the retooling. "No matter which side of the aisle you're on, there's a desire to have energy independence and to meet load growth." To Canary Media: "We've seen an explosion in the size of the ESS market, so we've really been able to grow our demand." LG told visiting journalists the United States added about 25 GWh of storage over the past decade and 100 GWh this year, citing Wood Mackenzie.

The talking point in the press kit is domestic content. LG says Lansing-made cells will help customers meet U.S. sourcing rules. Engineers on Kothari's tour were more precise: the LFP cells are built in the United States; the raw materials still come from countries including Indonesia and China.

That is the factory Washington actually opened. A plant designed for GM electric trucks now feeds a Toyota crossover and a pile of grid containers. A Republican interior secretary and a Democratic governor can both claim it. The cars that were meant to fill the building are no longer the policy. The cells still are.