Anthro Energy broke ground Tuesday on a factory in Louisville, Kentucky, that can make enough battery materials for more than 300,000 electric vehicles. The plant’s promised output is 25 gigawatt-hours’ worth of electrolytes, and the whole project leans on public money, tax breaks, and the usual polished language about “domestic” supply chains while workers and communities are left to live with the consequences.
Who Gets the Money
To build the factory, Anthro received a $24.9 million award from the Department of Energy under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and another $18.4 million in investment tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act. Kentucky added another $2.3 million in tax incentives in exchange for creating 110 permanent jobs. That’s the arrangement: public funds and public concessions on one side, a private startup on the other, with the state helping grease the rails for a company that raised its first funding round just four years ago.
David Mackanic, co-founder and CEO of Anthro Energy, said the plant will serve “domestic, high-spec customers” in “this emerging ecosystem for battery production where they frankly just need electrolytes — a domestic source of China-free supply, FEOC-free supply.” The line says plenty. The factory is being sold as a fix for supply-chain dependence, but the fix still runs through the same hierarchy: federal awards, state incentives, and corporate control over what gets made and who gets to profit.
What the Factory Is For
The Louisville factory will make a range of electrolytes, though Mackanic said he’d eventually like much of the output dedicated to Anthro’s own polymer product, Proteus. Proteus is designed to drop into an existing production line with minimal tweaks, which is a major reason the startup can begin production using other companies’ formulations. Once customers validate Anthro’s own material, the startup can shift production accordingly.
Mackanic said Proteus is a polymer that promises to pave the way to solid- and semi-solid-state batteries, which he called a holy grail of the battery industry. He said Chinese companies are reportedly looking to start trial production of solid-state batteries in 2027. The competition here isn’t some clean public good. It’s a race between corporate blocs, with governments handing out subsidies so private firms can claim a stronger place in the battery order.
Anthro says its electrolyte flows into the cell as a liquid, allowing it to penetrate the anode and cathode like today’s liquid electrolytes. Later, it firms up, essentially gluing the two parts of the battery together. The result is a cell that, depending on the formulation, is 10 to 15 times stronger than with a liquid electrolyte, Mackanic said, and can be flexible too. He said he envisions those qualities paying dividends not just in EVs, but drones and robots as well.
The Supply Chain and the Sales Pitch
Mackanic said that within a 12-hour drive, you can get to 70% of the battery production facilities in the United States that exist today. That geography matters because Anthro wants the Kentucky factory to become a key node in the emerging U.S. battery supply chain. The company is betting that proximity, subsidies, and industrial policy will lock it into the network of battery production already under construction.
The startup hopes the factory, scheduled to start production in 2028, will help fill demand from U.S. battery makers looking for materials that aren’t controlled by Chinese companies or otherwise caught up in “foreign entity of concern” problems. That’s the language of managed dependence, where one set of corporate and state interests is swapped for another while the people doing the work and living near the plant stay outside the room where decisions get made.
Mackanic said plenty of other battery materials companies have failed at this precise moment, when they move from small-scale to larger-scale production, but he is optimistic that the federal funding will help Anthro vault over the valley of death. He said, “To get into big applications, you have to have big production. The Department of Energy award solves a lot of the chicken or the egg problem.” The phrase sounds tidy. The reality is simpler: public money is being used to underwrite private expansion, and the state is once again acting as the venture arm for industry.
No grassroots response appears in the source, no mutual aid network, no worker-led control over the plant, no community say over what gets built in Louisville. Just the familiar machinery of subsidies, incentives, and corporate ambition dressed up as national necessity. The factory is scheduled for 2028. The hierarchy is already here.