Representatives from the Ontario Sewer and Watermain Construction Association (OSWCA) recently visited the site of the first-ever North American EV battery cell gigafactory in St. Thomas, Ont. to see their members at work.
OSWCA executive director Patrick McManus and government relations manager Stephanie Bellotto toured the St. Thomas Battery Cell Gigafactory and met with five member companies who are currently doing work to service the site and get the land ready to build on.
The companies include AMICO, J-AAR, Blue-Con Construction, Murphy Contracting and L82 Construction Ltd.
Work began on the site earlier this year.
“This is just our first planned visit for the summer, and I think there will be more to come,” said Bellotto. “This is a large-scale site, it’s about 370 acres. The entire industrial park is about the size of about 850 football fields. It’s going to be one of the largest automotive industrial parks in North America. The factory will be about the size of 210 football fields.”
Last April, Volkswagen Group and PowerCo SE, the Government of Canada, Ontario and the municipal government came together to announce details of the new plant.
Earthworks, piling and stormwater infrastructure underway
The plant is located in the city’s 1,500-acre industrial park known as Yarmouth Yards. It will have six production blocks with a potential production volume of up to 90 gigawatt hours, enough for about one million EVs a year.
“There are different sites but on the property they are all working simultaneously,” said Bellotto. “We saw earthworks, so they’re creating the foundations where the battery plant itself will be built on.
“There is also piling for the Yarmouth Yards rail, a rail over a traffic bridge that is going to extend from the existing CN rail main line and it’s going to help transport goods onto the PowerCo site.”
“We also saw a stormwater pipe being built that’s going to connect right through to the battery plant. This is just the start…there will be about 50 kilometres of pipe going in the ground.”
The gigafactory will create up to 3,000 new jobs and has the potential to create up to tens of thousands more indirect jobs at construction companies, suppliers and partners.
OSWCA to launch campaign to promote skilled trades this fall
“Part of why we were there, one of our main priorities at the OSWCA is to attract more skilled workers and promote our industry,” said Bellotto. “We’re working with the incredible team at BuildWitt to capture the important work that our members are doing across the province, so highlighting large-scale projects like this one, for example, and the workers who make it all happen.”
They are planning to launch a new campaign this fall to highlight different career paths people can take in the industry and why a job in the heavy civil construction industry can be rewarding.
“We met with a lot of young women and men while we were there who are very passionate and take pride in the work that they do, whether it’s operating large bulldozers or just the kind of impact the work they do makes on communities,” Bellotto explained.
“This PowerCo-Volkswagen site in St. Thomas it’s such a massive project that is going to make a positive impact and support growth in the region and surrounding communities, whether it’s attracting more businesses, jobs, more homes will be built, more roads and utility services. The workers that we spoke to are so proud of being a part of that.”
There can be a lot of misconceptions about working in construction and the campaign aims to address that.
“Employers are now even willing to train new workers so people can get education outside of the classroom and directly on the field. Speaking to our members and their workers, these are very high paying jobs and they start right away. There is a lot of opportunity to climb the ladder,” she said.
“There is always going to be a need for water or wastewater, stormwater infrastructure to be built or repaired, especially as Ontario continues to grow and we keep building. Through these visits and through the campaign we’re going to launch we really want to tell those stories directly from the workers who are working on these big impactful projects.”
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