Clean-energy company Freyr Battery says it’s abandoning plans to build a $2.6 billion factory in Georgia, which would’ve created 700 new jobs.

ATLANTA (AP) — A clean energy company is abandoning a plan to build a giant electric battery factory in Atlanta’s suburbs after it shifted to buy a solar panel plant in Texas.

Freyr Battery told officials in Newnan on Thursday that it wouldn’t build a $2.6 billion plant that was supposed to hire more than 700 people.

The factory would have built batteries to store electricity produced by renewable sources and release it later, company officials said. It would have been the second-largest battery factory worldwide when it was announced in 2023. But Freyr, a startup founded in 2018, never began construction on the 368-acre (149-hectare) site.

Freyr, which moved its corporate headquarters from Norway to Newnan in part to maximize its eligibility for the U.S. tax benefits of President Joe Biden’s climate law, said it was shifting its focus to a newly opened solar panel factory that it bought last year for $340 million from top Chinese solar panel maker Trina Solar.

Source: FORTUNE