Knox County Area Partnership President Ken Springer recently attended the State Association Conference for the Economic Development industry and the top trends in Illinois were discussed:
“Number one, the electric vehicle industry is starting to really emerge as a new manufacturing cluster for Illinois. The state has been very aggressively pursuing this industry, creating some new incentives at the state level to go after electric vehicles. Rivian in Bloomington-Normal is just part of that. Also, there is a manufacturer called Lion Electric that is building a one million square foot production facility in the Joliet region. Another trend that we are seeing though is projects are getting larger and unfortunately power availability has become a bottleneck for some of those projects. It used to be when economic developers would see project opportunities, they would always come with utility requirements. What we have been seeing in recent years is that the size of those power demands are getting bigger and bigger. It used to be a big project would be about five to ten megawatts. Today the average project proposal is between fifty and one hundred megawatts.”
Springer shares another area of discussion at the conference focused on workforce for Illinois companies.
