The United States does not stop offering opportunities to Spanish construction companies. ACS has just been awarded, through its subsidiary Turner, the construction of a new battery plant for electric cars, in a contract with Panasonic valued at 4,000 million dollars (about 3,800 million euros).
The project will be developed by a joint venture between Turner and Yates Construction, and will take place in De Soto, Kansas. It consists of the construction of an electric car battery factory and several surrounding buildings to respond to Panasonic’s objective of expanding its production capacity in the country.
The plant will begin production at the end of March 2025 and will have a production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year, making it a medium-sized facility among those being built in the country to respond to the deployment of electric cars from companies like Tesla, GM and Ford.
ACS already obtains 62% of its income in North America, a long way from Spain, where it barely enters 6% of the total. Of its project portfolio, which is at record levels after increasing by 8% last year, up to 68,996 million euros, 53% corresponds to North America, thanks in part to the infrastructure renewal plans of the Biden Administration .
His plans are now to diversify the business and focus on the development of infrastructures that provide high added value, such as those related to the development of electric cars.
At the end of last year, a contract was also awarded through Turner to build an electric vehicle battery factory in Ohio for Honda and LG for 3.5 billion dollars (3.4 billion euros). It will also start operating in 2025.
The company will also take charge, together with two partners, Kokosing Industrial and SSOE, of designing and building a material factory for electric car batteries in Kentucky valued at around 950 million euros.
The Kentucky project aims to supply materials to future battery factories in the country and its novelty is that a large part of it will come from battery recycling, which will reduce the costs of the process and avoid mining extraction.
These contracts are added to others won by Ferrovial, Acciona, Sacyr, FCC and OHLA in the country. Ferrovial has just announced a plan to move its headquarters from Spain to the Netherlands with the aim, it says, of later listing in the United States, which will improve its brand image and its ability to finance itself.
