Ford Motor Company announced an agreement with SK Innovation, a South Korea battery manufacturer, to build two factories in the United States to build batteries for the ever-increasing catalog of electric vehicles Ford is planning, Techcrunch reports.

Done the same week President Joe Biden test drove a new all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck, the announcement demonstrates Ford’s ongoing commitment to promoting electric vehicles.

SK Innovation already operates a factory in Commerce, Georgia.  It’s constructing two more factories in Georgia and one in Tennessee.  The Tennessee plant will produce batteries for Volkswagen, which operates a major assembly plant in Chattanooga.

“Initially with just a Mustang Mach-E, we felt like it was most efficient for us to purchase the batteries from the supply base, but as we start to move up that adoption curve, and move from just the early adopters to the early majority [. . .] we now have sufficient volume to justify this level of investment and this is why we’re pursuing this partnership,” Ford’s chief product platform and operations officer Hau Thai-Tang said Thursday.

The Biden Administration is pushing the manufacturers to allow workers to unionize at their planned locations, promoting a pro-union position that would provide for wage stabilization among the workforce.  Ford, as yet uncommitted to that, is working on a memorandum of understanding for the plants at this point.

“We don’t have our labor strategy defined yet. That will be determined by the joint venture itself once that entity is set up” this summer, Ford North America Chief Operating Officer Lisa Drake said.