The U.S. Clean Energy Manufacturing Boom Is Sputtering

America’s EV factory building boom is beginning to falter.

Since President Donald Trump took office, at least 34 factories or mineral refineries — totaling more than $30 billion in investment — have been paused, delayed, or canceled, according to a new report from researchers at Wellesley College who track the country’s clean energy manufacturing base.

“When you look at the projects that are slowing down, it’s all up and down the supply chain,” Jay Turner, an environmental studies professor who leads the database, told me.

Electric vehicle manufacturing projects are now being delayed or canceled at six times the rate that they were during the same period last year, he said.

The database, called the Big Green Machine, has data on EV and mineral factory activity going back to 2010, and has been actively tracking investment in the EV supply chain since 2022.

The news is not entirely bleak for the EV buildout, however. Another 68 projects have progressed in the past six months, according to Turner’s data. Those projects represent $24 billion in investment and more than 33,000 jobs.

At the same time, more than two dozen new projects have been announced in the past six months, but they are of a much smaller scale, the report finds. Taken together, the projects in this new wave add up to only $3 billion in investment — one-tenth of the $30 billion in projects that have been paused, delayed, or cancelled.

New Investments vs. Canceled Investments Since 2018

The Big Green Machine

The new data likely does not capture recent setbacks for the EV industry. Earlier this month, President Trump signed Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill, which will terminate all tax credits for buying or leasing an electric vehicle on September 30.

Turner told me that the slowdown was the predictable outcome of the Trump administration’s turn away from electric cars.

“In some ways, it’s exactly what we expected,” he said. “As concerns about the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law began last fall, we started to see projects slowing down. Since Trump was elected, those closures, cancellations, and delays have just ballooned.”

Particularly hard hit are projects located in distressed or fossil-fuel-dependent communities, as defined by the terms set out in the Inflation Reduction Act, he added. Facilities that depended on some kind of federal support or loan guarantee have also been especially likely to pause, he added.

The slowdowns have struck across the EV supply chain. Some battery factories have switched from producing lithium ion cells for vehicles to making large-scale batteries for the power grid. The new budget law, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, maintained tax incentives for installing grid-scale battery storage.

Mineral producers have also been affected. Li-Cycle paused work on mineral recycling plants in April, Turner said. A Canadian rare earth processing facility — one of the few such factories in North America — scaled back its ambitions this month. (“The data in our report is just the U.S., but when you add in Canada it’s more shocking how sharp the downturn has been,” Turner said.)

That follows other delays from last year. The Chicago-based company Anovion has continued to pause work on an $800 million facility in southwest Georgia that was slated to make synthetic graphite, which is essential for lithium ion battery anodes.

Last year, the chemicals company Albemarle delayed $1.3 billion in plans to build the country’s largest lithium refinery in South Carolina. “The economics just aren't there to build that plant,” Kent Masters, Albemarle’s CEO, told Reuters in May. China controls roughly three-quarters of the world’s lithium and synthetic graphite supply chains.

Despite its antagonism toward electric cars, the Trump administration has sought to prioritize some mineral projects. Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced a complex deal to invest in — and guarantee a buyer for the output of — a rare earths mine and processing facility on the California-Nevada border.

Whatever the cause of the slowdown, it isn’t limited to just electric cars. Total private manufacturing investment in the United States has leveled off and slightly fallen since October 2024.