Group14 to slow Moses Lake project

MOSES LAKE — Group14, a battery manufacturing company, will slow down but not stop construction of its Moses Lake facility. The company announced Thursday that the opening of its Moses Lake production plant will be pushed back to the second half of 2025. 

Rick Luebbe, Group14 chief executive officer, said the slowdown reflects a change in market conditions due to the tariffs and counter-tariffs between the U.S. and China. 

"About 70-to-80% of the battery market is in China,” Luebbe said.  

While demand outside China is increasing, right now China is the biggest market, and the regulatory environment means Chinese customers are ramping up manufacturing more quickly, he said.  

“As a result, we see the demand profile in Moses Lake as being in two waves,” he said. “The first wave was expected to come from China, just because they move more quickly on large-scale decisions. The second wave would be everybody else.” 

Tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration on Chinese imports in turn prompted tariffs in China on American imports, Luebbe said.  

“Chinese customers are telling us, ‘You know what, we’re really not that interested in paying that kind of tariff for imported materials.’ So, we’ve seen that demand go away,” he said. “Therefore, the real urgency to get the factory completed super-quick is not as strong as it was even two months ago.” 

Luebbe said the batteries produced by Group14 are already in use in consumer electronics and he thinks will continue to be in demand. 

“Now it’s a matter of, we can’t make enough material in our Seattle facility to go into (electronic vehicles) yet. That’s what Moses Lake will be doing – that's the kind of volume you need to support an automotive program,” he said. “The Chinese tariff thing is just taking down that first-wave demand and slowing it down a little bit.” 

The change will be mostly a change in the construction schedule, he said. Different contractors were working on different parts of the project in the same spaces at the same time, but now that’s not necessary. 

“Let one contractor get in there, do their work, finish it, then the next contractor get in there and do their work and finish it. More efficient, more effective, more cost-effective, especially. It allows us an easier path to completion since the urgency is not quite what it was just a couple months ago,” Luebbe said. 

The Moses Lake facility is now scheduled for opening sometime in fall 2025.  

“I expect the factory to be online sometime between the end of Q3 and the end of Q4, depending on how the China demand resolves itself over the next month. But again, anything can change. If the situation changes dramatically — the way it already seems to be changing almost on a day-to-day basis — or if we get some kind of local demand that really wants us to speed up, we’ll kind of re-accelerate.”