Engineering News-Record: Sparking the Future – Ford’s $5.8B Battery Plant Advances

Engineering News-Record (ENR) recently profiled the BlueOval SK Battery Park under construction in Glendale, Kentucky in “Sparking the Future: Ford’s $5.8B Battery Plant Advances”. The first battery production plant for the joint venture between Ford Motor Company and South Korean battery manufacturer SK On totals 3.9 million SF and, when complete, will have an annual capacity of 43 GWh.

Ghafari is providing full architecture and engineering services for this massive manufacturing facility along with an adjacent plant, working in partnership with contractor Barton Malow on the fast-track design-build project.

The first plant includes 1.8 million SF of clean room across its first two floors, which must meet stringent requirements for air particle count, temperature, and humidity. With hundreds of miles of piping inside the building, the team employed extensive building information modeling to resolve clashes between the building MEP systems and the process equipment to be able to shift the positioning of equipment such as the large air handling units.

Ghafari is delivering the same scope of services for the battery plant at Ford’s BlueOval City in Stanton, Tennessee. In the article, Ghafari Senior Vice President Mike Durand speaks about the early collaboration between the teams for both projects.

“There are a lot of redundancies, a lot of people involved in each of those projects,” he says. “To have to repeat that two or three times to get some direction going would have really burdened the schedule.”

Work has continued on schedule, and substantial completion of the first plant is expected within weeks. Team members are now obtaining temporary certificates of occupancy, with the process team conducting test runs of production equipment. The first production run is scheduled for early 2025.

Read the full ENR article here.