The time-lapse video is nothing less than stunning.
Starting in July 2023, and set to driving steel guitar music, it shows the transformation of a decades old Rust Belt industrial site into a factory focussed firmly on the future.
Gone are the remnants of a rusting steel mill that once employed 13,000 people, replaced by a clean-as-a-whistle factory making high-tech batteries vital to green energy networks.
The video shows the new factory set up by Form Energy in Weirton, West Virginia, on the banks of the Ohio river. It hopes to export its tech around the world, including to the power grid in Britain.
Its path shows that, even as Donald Trump tries to revive America’s old heavy industry with tariffs and executive orders, many communities are moving on.
The scene is a stark contrast to footage I shot on a reporting trip there almost ten years ago.
The images recorded on my phone, showed a major road bisecting part of the old plant, as rain lashed the windscreens. It was hard to forget.
It was no surprise the city was selected as a location by Michael Cimino, director of the 1978 film The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep.
Weirton is now hoping to again tell its own story.
It once symbolised the slow death of America’s steel industry, ravaged by cheaper imports from countries like Japan and Brazil. But locals say there is a new sense of hope.
Form Energy’s first high-volume manufacturing facility in Weirton, West Virginia (Photo: Form Energy)The mayor, Dean Harris, worked for 48 years in the steel plant and watched it fade. The last remaining 800 Weirton workers were laid off in 2024.
Harris believes the city of 20,000 people can have a bright future yet. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he told The i Paper.
Form Energy’s founders include Mateo Jaramillo, the former head of battery development at Tesla. It has the backing of investors including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. The 55 acre plant is said to represent a $760 million investment.
The site, selected from 500 potential US locations, hopes to expand rapidly and employ 750 people by 2028.
“We decided on Weirton for several key reasons,” said Sarah Bray, Form Energy’s vice president of communications.
“As a historic steel community, Weirton has the local infrastructure – direct river, railway, and hardened highway access – and local know-how around how to make great things out of iron.”
Global ambition
The company’s main raw materials are water, air and iron. Many battery manufacturers use lithium, which is harder to obtain and more expensive.
The batteries can store power for up to 100 hours and are meant for power utilities that require long duration energy storage, or LDES. Its first customer is Great River Energy, based in Cambridge, Minnesota.
The company is also looking to international markets, where demand for LDES is growing.
Earlier this year Ofgem, the UK energy regulator, confirmed an investment support scheme it hopes could unlock large sums in funding for projects. It has invited companies to bid for projects.
“LDES technologies contribute to decarbonising and making our energy system more resilient by storing electricity and releasing it when needed,” Ofgem said.
The factory floor at Form Energy’s facility in Weirton (Photo: Form Energy)“[It] can also help reduce costs for consumers through reducing their bills and by avoiding the need for expensive electricity grid upgrades.”
Form Energy is currently “working with multiple British developers to submit bids”. It declined to say who those companies were as negotiations were ongoing.
Weirton’s battery plant received bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats.
It benefitted from $100 million from the state of West Virginia, and $150 million from the Department of Energy under Joe Biden.
Biden spent billions of dollars to support infrastructure and green energy as part of his signature Inflation Reduction Act.
When it was announced the city had been selected, West Virginia’s Republican Governor Jim Justice said: “Weirton is long overdue for some incredible news.”
He said the “historic city is looking toward the future, and it’s very bright”.
Donald Trump speaks alongside coal and energy workers while announcing an executive order meant to revitalise the US coal industry (Getty Images)At the groundbreaking ceremony in May 2023, veteran Democratic senator Joe Manchin said it would build on the state’s “legacy as America’s energy powerhouse.”
West Virginia was once a Democratic stronghold, but that declined, in part as traditional union jobs disappeared.
When I visited ahead of the Nov 2016 presidential election, there was overwhelming support for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who vowed to revive its traditional steel and coal industries.
Weirton straddles two West Virginia counties, Hancock and Brooke.
In the 2016 election, Trump carried both by more than 40 points.
In 2024, with Trump up against Kamala Harris, the margin was even greater.
In his first term, Trump imposed a 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium imports. They were eventually lifted after he renegotiated the agreement with Canada and Mexico from the 1990s, in a deal known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.
Trump frequently boasted his would “be the best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA”
Leaving fossil fuels in the past
In his second term, Trump again promised to revive America’s traditional industries and signed executive orders to help steel and mining.
In March he imposed 25 per cent tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports, the first of a series of sweeping levies that targeted almost every country in the world and sparked economic turmoil the world over.
What it means for places such as Weirton is less clear. Though the Trump administration says it plans to cancel billions of dollars of Biden’s green energy investments, the battery plant is already up and running.
West Virginia is represented in Congress entirely by Republicans after Manchin retired and his seat turned red in November, taken by Jim Justice, the former governor.
Despite the tariffs imposed during his first term, there was only a modest boost to the steel industry. As for coal mining, there were fewer employed in that industry when Trump left office than he entered the White House.
Weirton is seeking to attract other employers and even pitch itself as a commuter town for people who the next state over in Pittsburgh and could avoid its higher taxes.
Younger residents are also focussed on the future.
Brittany Holloway, 33, a Republican, is serving her first term on Weirton’s City Council. Her husband served in the Marines and they have three children.
She was born in Weirton, then moved away before returning. She says she wants to make it a good place for people to raise families, and is working to establish volunteer programmes for youngsters.
“My father was a steel worker, my grandfather was a steel worker,” she said by phone after picking up her children.
“Going into the next phase, the mission is really seeing what the younger generation is wanting,” she says. “I think it’s important that is highlighted.”
Olivia Dowler, 23, is also fighting to ensure Weirton has a bright future.
She ran and lost a 2024 campaign for the West Virginia state legislature as a Democrat, and is running again in 2026.
Democrat Olivia Dowler says Weirton must honour city’s industrial history but look to the future (Photo: Courtesy Olivia Dowler)Dowler said it is correct for Weirton to honour its past, but it must also “look towards the future, and we can’t be afraid to do that, even if it means pulling away from things like fossil fuels”.
She points out West Virginia is among a handful states to experience population decline. It is vital people work to create a reason for young people to stay, she told The i Paper.
“If we don’t turn to that future, then it’s just going to continue. We’re going to continue to lose our lose young people [despite] there being so much magic here,” she said.
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