The Meloni Government has decided to move the PNRR funds intended to co-finance the Stellantis gigafactory that should be built in Termoli to other projects. This was announced by the Minister of Enterprise Adolfo Urso during the working table on Stellantis that was held at the ministry today, Tuesday 17 September, in the presence of the trade unions.
Last June, the multinational born from the merger between Fiat-Chrysler and Peugeot suspended ongoing discussions with the Government, the Molise Region and the unions on the electric car battery factory that should start production in 2026.
Today’s newspaper The Republic (whose publisher, Gedi, is owned by the holding company Exor, Stellantis’s largest shareholder) cites “ministerial sources” according to which, given the “uncertainty over the construction times” of the plant, Minister Urso “has communicated that he will proceed to reallocate the PNRR funds earmarked for the gigafactory towards other investments consistent with the energy transition of the sector”.
Urso, moreover, said he was willing to find the resources needed to finance the construction of the plant elsewhere.
The battery factory, to be precise, would not be built directly by Stellantis, but by ACC, a joint venture led by Stellantis itself but also participated by the German car manufacturer Mercedes and the French oil company Total.
The Termoli gigafactory was announced in 2021: a 2 billion euro investment, for which the Italian government had made available 400 million euros of PNRR funds. The factory should employ 2,000 people, as many as the Stellantis plant in Termoli, which produces endothermic engines. According to the initial roadmap, by 2030 the new plant should produce batteries with a capacity of 40 gigawatts.
In recent months, however, ACC has decidedly slowed down the project: on the one hand, due to the slowdown in demand for electric cars in Italy, on the other due to the need for a technological update on the batteries to be produced. For the same reasons, the gigafactory in Kaiserslautern, Germany, has reportedly been put on stand-by.
“Acc – the unions present at today’s meeting explain in a note – has declared that it is proceeding with its research and development activities for the production of new, less expensive and more efficient cells, but only at the beginning of 2025 should it have a new type of battery ready to supply to Mercedes and Stellantis, so as to finally be able to start investments in Termoli and in Germany”.
“Stellantis – underline the acronyms Fim, Fiom, Uilm, Fismic, UglM and AqcfR – has assured in principle that with the production of the current engines it will guarantee the continuity of the Termoli mechanical plant, however it has not identified new products capable of compensating for the progressive decline in volumes and the announced end of the Fire (the petrol engine currently in production, ed.) and today there is massive recourse to the use of social safety nets”.
A new meeting will be held at the ministry by October, but the unions are far from calm: “We cannot accept the state of ongoing uncertainty and progressive decline in which the Termoli plant finds itself”. The unions have announced that they will start a mobilization with the aim of “asking ACC to dissolve its reservations on the construction of the gigafactory, Stellantis to strengthen the current production of engines and the Government to keep the funds available to Termoli that are essential for the relaunch of a large industrial project that safeguards current and future employment”.
For his part, according to The Republic Acc has announced that it “intends to confirm its industrial plan and construction strategy in Italy no earlier than the first quarter of 2025”. For the joint venture led by Stellantis, the allocation of funds by the Italian government “is essential to support the competitiveness of ACC’s investments in Italy”.
Today, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares was in Turin to inaugurate the new global hub for all the group’s commercial vehicles in Mirafiori. “The ACC joint venture is doing its job. We see a lot of hesitations not only from a regulatory point of view, but also discrepancies within Europe on the ramp-up of battery cells. If it is not fast enough, we need to reschedule the timing of the investments, otherwise it would be a waste,” the manager explained.
Not even the new hub in Mirafiori is enough reassurance for the unions, worried about the future of a production hub where redundancy payments have been the norm for over fifteen years. The hub “has nothing to do with car production,” notes Edi Lazzi, general secretary of the Fiom-Cgil of Turin.
“Frankly, I am shocked, as well as worried about the future of the workers and the industrial stability of the Turin auto sector,” observes Lazzi. “We need production, we no longer know how to say it, to have future prospects. And we need hiring because the Mirafiori workforce is not really fine as it is, as stated by the CEO of Stellantis, because in seven years everyone will be retired and without new hires the plant risks closure due to consumption. Instead, Mirafiori really needs to become a Hub: but of car production reaching the fateful two hundred thousand units per year.”
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