A battery company that was hit with a $316 million award cancellation from the Department of Energy last year said late Thursday it was filing for bankruptcy.
Ascend Elements, which has been planning a $1 billion Kentucky plant to recycle electric vehicle batteries, is the latest casualty of a pullback in federal funding for renewable energy and other projects to build a climate-friendly grid.
In a lengthy statement on LinkedIn, CEO Linh Austin said “building a new industry is capital‑intensive and complex.” “As I knew when I accepted the position as CEO, we needed a stronger, more flexible balance sheet to match the scale of the opportunity in front of us,” he wrote.
There have been a wave of canceled clean energy investments because of federal funding cuts in the last year, particularly in the electric vehicle supply chain. The Biden administration sought to pump money into the sector.
