![]() In person, Bedard comes across as a popular college professor more than a cigar-chomping industrialist. Lion Electric is based in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, an industrial suburb 35 miles northwest of Montreal.īedard, 57, started the company in 2008, soon after leaving his job as a partner at accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. ![]() But they’re still seeking the shelter and support they need to thrive. They’re both hopeful signs about the state’s environment. It’s more like the piping plovers that showed up unannounced on Montrose Beach in 2019 and became the first of their species to nest in Chicago in half a century. Lion Electric is not yet part of Illinois’ economic bedrock. The company’s stock dropped to $1.92 on June 6 from $33.48 in January 2021 as concern spread through Wall Street that the transition to a zero-emission economy will be slower and more expensive than many investors had hoped. But like Lion Electric, the president’s clean energy revolution is still in a young and fragile state. He’ll doubtlessly celebrate the $5 billion his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set aside for electric school bus rebates last year. Lion Electric has invited Biden to its official ribbon-cutting in Joliet on July 21. Without such measures, the clean-air benefits of the electric vehicles Pritzker wants to build in Illinois will be going to other states, said Brian Urbaszewski, director of the Respiratory Health Association in Chicago. These include paying subsidies up to $120,000 per vehicle for electric trucks, and a requirement that Lion Electric’s competitors will also have to build more battery-powered vehicles. When the Democratic-controlled legislature finished its spring session last month, lawmakers approved bills to make it easier for public-private partnerships to expand I-55 to 10 lanes from six through Black and brown Chicago neighborhoods where life expectancy is already being suppressed by congestion and truck pollution.īut they adjourned without acknowledging the danger posed by this added pollution or considering any measures to mitigate it. Illinois spent just $7.9 million in incentives for the Lion Electric factory. Rivian began building vehicles in downstate Normal two years ago, and now employs a similar number there. Georgia won out in part with lavish incentives, including $1.5 billion for Rivian Automotive to build electric trucks and SUVs at a factory with 7,500 workers east of Atlanta. Georgia has been a big winner, with a staggering $23 billion in new electric vehicle investments since 2018. During that time, Illinois has failed to join in the parade of electric vehicle and battery plant announcements fueled by President Joe Biden’s historic infrastructure spending. That’s dozens of vehicles each day.īut two years have passed since the company’s Joliet announcement. In a few years, if all goes as planned, the Joliet plant could be building 20,000 buses and trucks a year, he said. Today the factory is hiring new workers every week and hopes to have the capacity to make 2,500 buses annually by the end of 2023, Bedard said. The Lion Electric factory is unquestionably a green feather in Pritzker’s cap.Įmployees work on the frame of a LionC electric school bus at the Lion Electric plant in Joliet. It offers hope that Illinois can put people to work attacking its most significant source of greenhouse gas pollution: tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. Lion Electric brings the prospect of 1,400 jobs and the first new vehicle assembly plant to metropolitan Chicago since 1965. Bedard wants to run a zero-emission enterprise, and he’s telling suppliers that someday soon he’ll refuse deliveries from fossil fuel-burning trucks.īedard is writing an updated rule book for Chicago manufacturing, even though he’s new to town and even though state officials in Springfield have yet to throw their full weight behind his company. It’s also - thanks to a statewide commitment Pritzker was then shepherding through the legislature - on its way to being carbon-free by 2050.Ĭlean energy was a big plus for Marc Bedard, the Lion Electric chief executive officer. Pritzker convinced the Canadian company that in suburban Will County, electricity is not just cheap, reliable and abundant.
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