As Ford Motor Company charted plans for a $5.6 billion electric vehicle and battery campus at the Megasite of West Tennessee, one priority became clear — a trained workforce ready for the assembly line.
To meet that need, the Detroit automaker hopes to roll out a special curriculum for K-12 and engineering students that focuses on the skills needed to manufacture electric trucks and batteries, Lisa Drake, Ford’s head of North American operations, said Tuesday during an interview with The Tennessean. .
Ford announced its West Tennessee investment in late September. Governor Bill Lee, who called it “the largest single investment in the state’s history,” held a special session soon after for lawmakers to approve an $884 million package to help sweeten the deal.
The project, which could bring in about 5,800 jobs, is expected to start in early 2022 and be completed by 2025.
Tennessee lawmakers have agreed to spend $40 million to build the Tennessee College of Applied Technology near a megasite in Haywood County to meet demand for workers.
Ford, which has been in talks with the Department of Education and the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, hopes to design a tailor-made course for the company’s needs, Drake said. The company could even install equipment mirroring Ford’s assembly plant, he said.
“Can you imagine all your kids knowing exactly how batteries work?” Drake said at a public affairs conference hosted by the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce in Nashville.
“They’re trying to find an inventory of existing technical training programs that we can leverage immediately,” Drake said during the interview. “We want to start training sometime next year (or) early 2023.”
Companies could start preparing high school students to enter Ford plants, Drake said.
“Those ninth graders, when they graduate in four years, this factory will open,” he said. “That’s probably the first population we want to target in high school.”
Drake also mentioned the possibility at Tuesday’s event. . He was joined by former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who served as Ford’s vice president of policy, and former federal prosecutor and law professor Steven Croley, who served as Ford’s chief policy officer.
Investments in workforce development could benefit Tennessee for decades to come, Huntsman said at the event.
“The opportunity for everyone here to sit down and imagine the best templates, best practices for education for all citizens is a great gift,” he said.
Faced with the expected population growth once the site is up and running, Drake said the company currently has no plans to house its workers. Instead, cities in the area plan ahead for housing needs, he said.
The company itself has not made a commitment to employ a certain percentage of local workers, Drake said. It also has no plans to offer scholarships or incentives to attract workers. But Ford’s philanthropic arm, the Ford Fund, could in the future roll out plans to diversify its workforce by serving “underserved communities,” he said.
Going forward, Drake said the company should first enlarge its wastewater treatment plant, map the highways in the area and calculate the environmental impact of the facility.
Asked if the facility would be energy efficient, Drake said the company was in talks with the solar power plant and hoped to harness geothermal energy from the Memphis Sand Aquifur below the site to cool the facility. The ultimate goal, he says, is to be “carbon neutral.”
“Our vision is to be carbon neutral at the start of production for the assembly site,” he said.
Contact Yue Stella Yu at yyu@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bystelayu_tnsn.
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